


Us Ones In Between

by Voreadus



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Drama & Romance, Emotional landscapes, F/M, Falling In Love, Force Bond (Star Wars), Forced Bonding, Hades/Persephone AU, Inspired by Music, Light Angst, Mental Link, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, au elements, trapped together
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-14 16:35:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 30,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5750341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Voreadus/pseuds/Voreadus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey and Kylo Ren explore the bond they share after escaping Starkiller. Spiraling into the deepening chaos of their shared experiences, emotions, and desires they are fated to succumb to a force greater than themselves. As they are pulled into the void of the connection that binds them, they must navigate the strange game it plays by thrusting them into the echo of an ancient tale in the roles of Hades and Persephone. They both work to twist the narrative to their favor, using their memories to redefine their roles within it, and end the game victoriously.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Glycerine

**Author's Note:**

> Hey you, thanks for giving this a look!
> 
> Length and Updates:  
> Currently, takinf a break to recharge on this story while I write for another I'm working on in a different fandom. I just started to feel like I was rushing this one. I plan on posting the last few chapters when I've finished it completely and hopefully will be inspired again soon! Thanks for all the readers thus far. It means the world. 
> 
> Story Notes:  
> The way I write how the force bond works isn't entirely canon compliant as far as I understand, especially when it comes to how it brings about the Hades/Persephone AU element. I still think it makes for a fun story. The AU bits leave the original characters intact- so it doesn't suddenly become a H/P story, but a Rey and Kylo Ren in their roles story. Also, later chapters will almost definitely contain adult content/smut so if that is not your thing this may not be for you, but I will put warnings, and update tags when I start into that part (edit: We have achieved explicit! hurray. Chapter 10 on if you wanna avoid). Lastly, the title of the story and each chapter title will be pulled from songs that inspire me, and I will put title and artist in the end notes.

 

She could feel the thrum of their connection vibrating over her senses. Like someone had reached out and plucked at a string which now stretched tautly between their consciousness. It was unsettling. 

Her eyes shot open.

“Master Luke, I…”

“Rey, you must concentrate. We need to know more about this.”

He pushed into her mind a bit, rooting around as she had just been remembering Kylo Ren doing on Starkiller. Only, it was different. She felt Luke there, but it didn’t… resonate. She frowned at the familiarity of the concept. 

“Rey, concentrate on your memories The ones when the feeling was strongest. I want you to meditate on it, and I’m going to...eavesdrop. You are safe. Nothing can hurt you here.”

He tried to sound delicate about it. She knew he didn't intend it to feel as invasive as it really was, and honestly she didn’t need his cajoling. She guessed that she was starting to get used to people wanting to know what was inside her head. 

The biggest problem lately hadn't been what everyone else wanted out of her mind, but what she was having such a hard time defining herself. Luke Skywalker could look all he wanted, but he couldn't _hear_ the memories like she could. A tune she couldn't shake, but couldn't place. Recollection had become like a place she visited in her head instead of a transcription she recalled distantly. Vivid and real.

Under her master’s encouraging stare she settled back into her memories. The scavenger from the desert thought of the ocean against the cliffs below them, and how the unknowable depth of it frightened her. Then she plunged her concentration into the sea of her own thoughts as they crashed into her. She gripped tightly to a filament which hung loosely in the waves. The thread that connected her back to Kylo Ren. Her mind clutched onto it pulling herself along through where it weaved itself into her memories. 

She'd felt the cord vibrate with a dissonant resonance as she landed in her recollection of his interrogation once again. The memories picked at the chord of this thought, playing out a sharp note on her senses, sending her into the chaotic elegance of reliving a memory that the connection had made into a song.

She felt Kylo Ren reach into her mind again. She thought his fingers must have truly breached the edges of her skull, literally reaching into her head. His initial technique had the grace of a butcher playing surgeon. 

Her blossoming resistance had been the first time she really felt the connection, though it was also the first time she clearly remembered feeling herself utilize the force. Her inexperience at the time had left her blind to the significance of the pull between them in that moment. She assumed it was a natural part of what he was doing in her head.

Now she saw it. Clearly there. The thread between them. How it purred as she groped for it in the memory. How his eyes danced with danger and fascination at her. Mistaking her confusion for fear he felt compelled to assure her that he too felt it. As he reached back into her mind she could feel him manipulate the connection. Thrumming on the cord, this time with deft precision, searching and waiting for the right note to echo back. 

She was suddenly struck by how intricate the connection truly was. How it wasn’t just him pulling at her mind, but how she could feel where it was he wished to pull from. How the connection buzzed with the sound of his emotions, each with its on frequency, looping up and down and resonating with her own. That her thoughts were humming into his head the same. Like they were singing to each other in the dark space between their minds.

The oscillation of his technique as he reached into her mind roared back over her. She could feel the melody, and he had taught it to her. She had taken his advantage, and used it to hold fear back up to him like a mirror. Kylo Ren had been shaken by the turnaround, and she swore, for a moment, he looked almost vulnerable. Like the savage edges of his sharp exterior could barely contain the silvery undercurrent of his inner turmoil. 

She pulled away from the thought brutally. These deep gouges in his mind made her uneasy. She could feel something reaching out from them, as if through fire, to grab at a quickly retreating lifeline. 

Her lungs begged for air as she set up from the meditation. As if the weight of the memory had crushed her in its immense pressure as she sank deeper into it. 

“..Only peace.”

She heard her master finish the mantra as she tried to cling to his voice to center herself. As soon as she thought she was starting to come back around, she felt the connection tug like a moth on a string flying away from her. Insistent but inconsequential. In the respite she bobbed on the surface of her sea gulping in air. Then, as if a hand had pushed her back down, she was dragged again into the ice cold water of her encounter. 

She felt herself being thrust against the tree in the blue forests of Starkiller Base. She felt him for a moment, the force he used to throw her back magnifying their connection. The deep satisfaction and triumph she expected to feel careening at her was instead a dark uncertainty. With himself, in his actions. Not the shadow of evil, but the darkness of someone shrouding themselves to hide. Her teeth chattered together in a shiver as the name of the feeling hit her- shame.

When she had come back to consciousness to see a distant purple light fade to red as Finn was struck down she had seethed. Kylo Ren had hurt her friend, he had killed Han Solo, and he wasn't allowed to feel sorry for himself about it right now! She let the whir of emotions carry over her dizzyingly.

Suddenly, she felt a pull on the battlefield. Not her connection to him- from that she could only hear the echos of her rage bouncing off the wall he must have built in his mind against her. The call came from the lightsaber in the snow. As she called back she could feel the sparks of his will against hers as they fought for control. She felt her side throb with a distant pain as he strained. 

By the time the saber had ignited in her hand the flow of events began to move strangely for her in this place. She recalled it was a memory, and not reality, but only for a moment before it swallowed her into it again as his red blade drove toward her. She leaned into her clumsy strikes. Fear hummed around her, ricocheting off his barriers against her. 

Every time their blades connected she could see a flash of him. It sent the string of their connection into chaotic waves. She didn’t need to see his mind to know how disconnected he was. His strikes and parries came half heartedly, like a smile that never makes it to the eyes. As he pounded on his wound it sent a sharp ache into her consciousness. It snaked its way in through the heat her anger burned into the line connecting them. 

He continued to flick her attacks away. Each time the purple light of their blades crossing filled the grove a little window opened up in his mind and she could hear the simple and direct thoughts, “dodge, parry, strike, strike, block,” as he predicted her moves and easily countered them. She wondered if she could take advantage of his underestimation of her, or if it was warranted. 

She waited until he fell back into the pattern and then broke it, careening into him and changing the battle. His thoughts came more insistently now, “willful, strong, clever...useful,” which she might have thought was calculated except the rising thrill behind them. It’s as if her determination to fight had shook him loose from his stupor. 

He pinned her under his blade as she held out against him. The lights flitting over his overwhelming features were the true window to his next thoughts, “fascinating, beautiful, desirable” and then, unintentionally, his last thought tore the wall down and spoke to her mind directly.

“I will keep you.” 

It dripped over her thoughts as if his eyes had bored the words into her. Sparking over her mind like the light of their weapons in his eyes. 

He hadn’t intended for her to hear that particular thought, she realized, and tried to cover himself with his offer to teach her. He must have hoped that the immediate physicality of his voice would cover the betrayal of his thoughts, yet there it was. Looming over her. 

She closed her eyes to meditate, and she felt his stare drink her in. The intensity of the feeling of it renewed her in a way. She gathered her strength, and rejected him with all her will.

“You're vile.”

She thought at him, as he staggered away from her blow. She sliced his clothes. His shoulder. She struck his face, and she stood over him as he bled into his eyes. She had tried her best to copy his wall. To harden, herself in that meditative moment before she struck. He did disgust her, but that feeling wasn't as strong as it should be when it was measured against all the others weighing in on her thoughts. 

“Maybe...I could just, end you?” The thought came on its own. It boiled over. She knew she'd shared it.

Her mind reeled a little. She hadn’t realized she was earnestly considering it. To be free of whatever this pull was she felt as he lay on the ground, even now. How it fascinated her too.

A vision of him invaded the memory. She leaned across the endless chasm forming between them, reaching her hand out to him. He reached back desperately. Their faces moved farther from one another as he fell over the edge and into the void. Both of their hands closing around air. 

The manifestation of it had been sudden and real, even if it hadn't happened that way. She thought maybe she had fallen asleep in her meditation, and had dreamed of falling. Still, she knew, it was something deeper. It was him. His dejection. Her failure. An echo of his need flowing into their connection the same as it had on the battlefield, but this time stronger, direct, and with more urgency.

“ You fascinate me. I want you.” 

It whispered. Skittering along the edges of her growing consciousness- she couldn’t tell if it was his voice or hers. 

 

\----------

It took Kylo Ren longer than he would admit to understand why the girl insisted on constantly flooding his mind with the irritating buzzing of the feelings their last encounter brought him. How even at this great distance they were so demanding of his attention. How much effort it took to maintain his mental sanctuary. 

It had been in the flash of _his_ face that it all fell into place. His uncle, his former master, her current master. Luke Skywalker was a close minded, ideologically stunted, old fool. Kylo Ren was sure he had something to gain from her prodding of their bond. 

He paced his quarters. He was fighting back the anxious feeling he got whenever she engaged the thread that wound around his thoughts. The thoughts he needed desperately to keep from bouncing back down the line in reply to her plucking. He couldn't fight the tightness of his expression as he delved into why. Into what thoughts he was clinging to.

He felt her reach into her memories of their interrogation. For her it was a breath between words. For him it was the long empty silence. Cursing his impulse to carry her here. The singular pulling pressure on his mind that she exuded even while unconscious. Waiting for the building voice of their connection to manifest into something that made sense. The ages of waiting. How he felt like he'd never be ready to wake her. Self inflicted mental exhaustion as he sat before her playing it out over and over. Needing it to be something. Unsettled by the need. Furious for the lack of understanding. 

She couldn't reach there. She only saw the aftermath of his self doubt playing out. His uncomfortable desire to connect with her. The clumsiness with which he had entered her mind as he fumbled through his own bleary memories. They chimed like distant bells when he reached for the connection that only grew in enormity as he got closer to her. 

He still couldn't shake the picture that had flowed into his head when he had seen her rise back up in the forest. Wielding the blue lightsaber. Like a feeling of long lost. A remote nagging memory that called out with the loudest yearning to the connection they shared. A crescendo of all the previously unimaginable feelings of longing and sadness that she had begun to manifested in him. It had been distracting. 

By the end of their encounter all that he had expected from himself in that day, and how all his expectations had failed him utterly, he had been nearly relieved by her desire to strike him down. He felt the irony of her triumph over him in so many ways. 

For all the murderous intent and proclamations of disdain that day he most strongly remembered the last thought she had sent out toward him. A hauntingly fearful question with the backdrop of an imploding base as General Hux scowled at him from across the fleeing command ship.

"Hey," her voice moved over him with so much uncertainty in herself, "You made it, right?"

He had thought of taking the little inquiry and swallowing it up, as if it had flown down their connection to nothing. Let her think he was gone. He imagined her reaching out to him as he plummeted into darkness, and not being able to save him. How letting him slip through her fingers would feel like a failure to her. Like wishing to kill him for a moment must have. How he thought her question, now seeping over his mind, must be guilt. Even if he wished it was regret. Even if he wished it to be longing even more. 

He let her ruminate in the heavy silence for a bit. He was enjoying the edge of her frenetic pursuit. He dared to reach toward her for a moment. He could see her staring through the stars with a intensity that suited her. The snow that melted from her hair causing the wayward strands to cling to her forehead. The detritus of battle peppered over her expression. The dirt, which was all that remained of Starkiller. The traitor's blood. Her blood. His blood. 

"The connection remains." 

He had answered as matter of factly as he could manage. Finally giving in to her need. Her rising emotions had caused him to feel strangely self conscious over his study of her face. Her worry over him should have made her escape drum into him as even more of a defeat. Instead it created an entirely new vulnerability. He snatched at it. Greedily forcing the tumult down. It was as if all his training and control was straining to contain an imminent explosion.

She had gone silent for a long while after that. At least until she had traveled to seek the training she refused from him.

He had seen her passion, and how it outweighed what it was he desired from her on that day. He had admired her cleverness, and found that these willful things could be useful. Worst of all, he saw how beautiful they all were when she wore them. How well suited she was to the nature she exhibited through her actions. How much he loathed Luke for being chosen to see her skills to fruition. To get to be near to all that made her fascinating.

They shared something Luke couldn't though, an intimate proximity which he had been relieved wasn't lost when she had refused him. The fervor she had awoken in him. His desire to posses her for what it was that made her so luminous in his mind. They made his uncle a pitiful obstacle. The old Jedi couldn't stop what was growing between them. The resilient binding melody. As far as he could tell, for all the pressure Luke was putting on her to test its limits, he was in fact strengthening it. 

Every time he felt the quaver of her curious reaching in his mind it became more clear. More steady. Where at first there had been a painful clacking hiss on his senses, her presence now was a crooning hymn to a frayed psyche. Her feelings. Her will. Everything he had admired in her that day. He could push the warm cadence of it into himself. Like he was holding it to his very being. 

In his lonely vigil he began to feel it. A wonderful pressure. It left him suspended in her moments as she hesitantly explored. Sighing. Guardedly trying to pull the distant tones of her thoughts into him when she grabbed on to the bond. As he wound the thread around him gently. As it tightened. His heart had purred under his ribs. He thought of her against them. He swears their heartbeats harmonize. Then he realizes she no longer struggles against the embrace.

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Story Title song: "Us Ones In Between", by Sunset Rubdown  
Chapter Title song: "Glycerine", by Bush  
Thank you for sticking it out to the end of chapter one of my first multi chapter fic!


	2. Part Of Me Apart From You

The lingering effects of their interactions had begun to leave Kylo Ren staggered. The more commanding the foray into the pitch of it the more prevailing the fallout. Her memory, him remembering her. How she looked, and what she felt. What he felt when he looked at her. It was a seductive narcotic that he imbibed wholly with every affair. 

Now he layed in his quarters suffering from a fever that was only in his mind. The grip of sublime euphoria fading as they slink away from the connection in exquisite exhaustion. It was all they could usually manage after each glancing blow. The connection magnified the tangibility of experience only to have more to devour. Then it opened it’s jaws, and thinking you’ve been released you run, only to find it enjoys the chase most of all. 

The cycle of it had cast him into unyielding mental abstractions. 

It was a sly madness. He would fall into it, and through it, and out the other side. Then it would pull him in again and again. Musing on it, he thought the worst part must be when it retracted. When the bond returned to the inert space it had allotted itself in his head. How it all became the surface of a glassy lake. No sign of the turmoil before. No hint of when it would return. The silence of it was so complete he couldn’t truly grasp if the rapture he had felt, that left him weak now, was ever really there. 

So he laid in his quarters trying not to think. Or to remember. Or wonder. Especially not to feel.

His ceiling acted as a massive window, and he idly reached his sturdy arm into view above him to see it silhouetted against streaks of light as stars rushed by. It looked black and empty. The empty arm of an empty vessel. Would willing his mind away shield him from something intent on consuming everything left? At least in this reprieve he hoped it would keep his mind from gorging on itself.

It took a great deal of will to force himself into the motions of a living creature. To rise from bed. To pull on clothes over an aching frame, and don the face he wore for the world. _A new, old face_ he had thought running his fingers over the freshly cast ridges on the faceplate, but thinking of the pernicious scar. 

He felt toxic for a moment, but bit it back into him. He couldn’t stir their union. She left him like this, but he wouldn’t allow her to touch how that felt to him. It wasn't for her to see.

His concentration redirected, he pushed his efforts back to the duties he had been neglecting as he recovered. Oversee the knights, train, avoid Hux, deal with mundane first order politics, eventually run into Hux and be sucked into an unwinnable spiteful staring contest through a mask. This particular session of ocular subterfuge was necessary, however, as Hux had come to announce Snoke’s summon of them both. Hopefully, to direct their aimless travels to a base where he could finally receive his master’s training. Maybe put a muzzle on the madness.

Snoke’s hologram loomed as much as it could in the smaller conference chamber of their current vessel. If it were anyone else sitting projected into the angular black throne their presence may have come up diminished after having faced a twentyfive foot high version on Starkiller. However, for Snoke it wasn’t how much you had to crane your neck to see him that made his evaluating gaze so uncomfortable. 

“Supreme Leader.”

Both Hux and himself in unison gave reverence. Snoke’s acknowledgment always came in the subtlest of body language, and at his shift they rose from their knees waiting for him to deem them worthy of speaking to. 

“General. I trust that your handling of the new construction has been… adequately thorough?” 

“I assure you, Supreme Leader, the failures of the last design will not be repeated.”

Kylo Ren had thought of the faraway eyes of the new head engineers who had been brought on to oversee the design of Hux’s next great weapon as they watched their predecessor’s bodies being crudely disassembled. He looked at Snoke. He thought of loyalty and fear.

He felt pallid eyes swivel to him.

“You think of devious methods Kylo Ren?”

It had been rhetorical. The Supreme leader easily knew his mind as his focus settled indifferently on the space between his subordinates to leave them in prolonged silence. 

“Clever or cruel, I’m interested only in what you can bring to me,” in a faint gesture what was left of his chin tucked down and his head twisted like an ancient owl to look better on the face of his apprentice, “Show me, Kylo Ren, what do you bring?”

He knew this was meant to belittle him in front of Hux who had plucked him from the snow after his intended quarry tore open his face and fled the scene. He could practically feel the corner of Hux’s lips quiver in a hidden smirk. 

With the message recieved the pressure in the room withdrew as quickly as Snoke had willed it. There was never really displeasure, or anger, or even disappointment in his dealings with them- only indifference and the ever present implied threat of death.

“General,” faintly glowing spidery fingers waved dismissively, “we are done here.”

Hux bowed, catching a gloating eye contact with Ren as he returned to his usual alert posture, and swiveled around to leave. His master, however dispassionate he seemed, was always playing them against each other. Diminishing him in front of Hux before he was dismissed served to remind him of his failures. While there was a certain cruelty to it, Ren never got the sense that his Master particularly enjoyed it. Rather, Snoke knew how much it provoked him, and how little he could do to express that. He imagined it was his Master’s way of maintaining the instability that crawled under his skin. To keep him in line. 

“You do have something to bring. Come to me now Kylo Ren. It is time to delve deeper into your...situation.” 

A map appeared in the room, and he studied it realizing quickly where his master waited. 

“Until you arrive, focus on this connection and gather information.” 

“Yes, Master, as you say.”

He took a knee. The hologram lingered for a moment, broadcasting Snoke’s irreverent glare, and then disappeared. Its departure was always a furtive relief. 

The space behind Kylo Ren’s eyes pulsed as his mask wheezed releasing from his face. He was acutely aware of how heavy it all felt; an uneasy gravity. Nothing would be painless after her. Now he was assured that Snoke, like the degenerate Jedi, was planning on using the bond as well. He was expected to wriggle his way into her mind like she had been doing with him. For what end he could only guess. He assumed to sway her to their side, or to find her, and to dispose of her. Those seemed the most logical actions for the Supreme Leader. 

It was obvious Snoke found interest in her. It was that enduring thought that made him wonder if his Master had some other great scheme laid out a hundred steps ahead of him. He wasn’t entirely displeased at the thought of his mission being as tied to her as he had become. When he was in the throws of the connection’s delusions he would experience an ache for her physical presence above all things. He knew how much their proximity enhanced the high of it. 

In the moments between he worked thoroughly to dismiss the strength of that longing, because in these visions it left him utterly helpless. A ridiculous weakness. A weakness that the bond happily nurtured toward addiction. 

He disliked the feeling of control it held over him. When everything was still, he swore that the discarding of his want was the truer feeling until again he felt the captivating need for something of her near him.

He shuddered a bit as his limbs felt the toll of his exertions. The night before as she pulled them into the visions of Starkiller, this morning as he moved through his day, Snoke’s hungry aura. His long heavy legs carried him to the obsidian throne, and he sank into it.

He had dropped his helmet, and taken off his gloves. As he reached up to comb the hair out of his eyes and his hand slipped past the scar he realized that it didn’t elicit such a sting in his mind as it had earlier. At least it was a physical reminder that she had been real. That however magnified the connection made his feelings toward her, that there were feelings, and those too were real. 

Suddenly the quiet seemed to hold its breath. Then a pulse.

The blue lightsaber thrummed into his consciousness. He felt an anxiety outside of himself. Her. He sat at once intent on the emotions in connection to the weapon. This flash of her thoughts had come not from a willful attempt to breach him, but in the strong surge of her will to fight. It violated the implied truce of their mutual shield. 

A panic began to rise in her that he felt in a very vivid empathy. He saw her face tired and distant. The cold light of her weapon making her skin pale and translucent. He nearly reached out to her in the empty conference room fearing she would faint like she had once done on his bidding. 

A glowing throb nagged at his non dominant shoulder, and he realized she had been struck. By a lightsaber. She was training with Skywalker. Her Master gave her no quarter as he could feel the weapon bear back down on her again. 

He couldn’t help but lean into the feeling of her fight. Of her. She withstood the pain without issue, but he thrived on it. He could feel her arms like they were his own. She had settled into the awareness wrapping around her. Into a borrowed skillset she had yet to earn, but was more than powerful enough to utilize. 

Now she was easily tossing aside Luke’s strikes. The fear of her last battle with him, what had scratched along her nerves as she struggled against her Master, was now its own comfort. Luke’s expression had shifted into a satisfying need for concentration as his Padawan out maneuvered him. 

“There it is!”

He called to her mind as her hands felt his sway, and moved into the opening her Master had left, slicing away a large chunk of his trailing sleeves. He felt a bold grin, and though her body was so obviously exhausted, the feeling of her expression radiated brightly. It was the first time she had made gains in a fight against the Jedi. His pride snuck into her through the connection.

“I could have shown you so much.”

He thought to her solemnly. Wishing he was there training with her, to revel in her cocky grin before wiping it off her face to remind her of how far she had yet to go. How far they would go together. To later discreetly reward her cleverness for how she had utilized the power he had showed her. He felt her seize up under his proclamation realizing his presence as more than just a battle fury.

He felt himself standing behind her as if she were really just right there. Everything around them was empty. Pulled into their own little world again. 

Her initial jolt of discomfort at the suddenness of it told him her mind was present in the vision. He placed a commanding step in between them, unable or unwilling to stop himself. As he let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding he came just close enough that the curve of her back was filled with his chest. She stiffened but didn't move. He didn’t need to see her face to know the pinpricks of her pupils. He could hear the murmured chorus of her heart and the lungs below it pushing out little breaths. 

Being this close he could take in her heady scent. It left him skittish. For where warm and dry would have been obvious instead he was filled with her verdant and maddeningly efflorescent aura.Then the most vexing fragrance which lay below the meadow. Blooming through an ever delicate sheen of her exertions during the fight. It sent the world around him into a throbbing pulse in the hushed moment. It was a ghost, like the lingering smell of a lover in the sheets, it clutched him despite their distance. Whispering in his ear- lust. 

He reached out around her and gently placed a hand where he knew she had been injured. She stirred at the touch, jumping as if he had caught her indulging in their proximity as guiltily as he had. The contact felt like static where it landed. With all the other sensations so real, he had hoped that he could touch her again. Still, as it prickled over their skin, the contact had rewarded him with a tiny moan escaping her throat as he pulled his hand away.

The isolation they occupied was cut off immediately. A cacophony of their yearning and fear snapping back at his consciousness. He could feel it all deliquescing around him. Snow on hot skin. His mind was agape, and he wanted it all back, for he had worshiped everything within it. 

He awoke leaning his head onto the seat of the great black throne. He felt an urgent sickness in his stomach. He knew it wasn’t a dream. It was something that lived in between dreaming and dying.

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: "A Part Of Me Apart From You" By Colin Stetson  
with a close second being "And In Truth" from the same album.


	3. Bluebird Turning Grey

Rey stood shivering as the rain started to fall. She was far away, but the blue lightsaber still stood vigil over her. Clutched in a guard with white knuckled hands, and sizzling with errant precipitation. 

Her master had struck at her before he had recognized her absence. Somehow she was still managing to block his attacks, but would always return to her defensive stance and distant stare when he backed away. So, with no other choice, he waited. 

A dark place surrounded her awareness. A dark presence. The ocean in her mind had washed her back up on the shores of their shared delusion. She was too tired to fight the current. She had felt Kylo Ren in her mind moments ago, and now, after he had closed their distance, she felt him a breath away from pressing into her back. It caused her to want to stand up straight. Defiant to the casual closeness he had afforded himself. Still, she felt her power in his need. That his first action in being drawn into this place was to immediately steal closer. 

His interest didn't strike her as the dangerous attention she had felt before in her life alone on Jakku. It didn't leave her wanting to hide in herself and disappear. To go unnoticed. It certainly could be, yet it maintained its own feral sense of order. It definitely wasn't some soft romantic gesturing to stand close, and take greedy breaths, and press testing exhales into her. It's as if he desired to be possessive, but hadn't quite figured out how to hold on. He played at knowing. At taking. He could lead the pack of wolves that was his desires to her door, but he still paced outside unable to enter. 

She enjoyed his attempt though. She wouldn't deny the guilty indulgence of his want. Of the warming friction building up from the mingling of their standoff. The way the heat of him made his smell stronger. Like the thick smoke of a fire being put out by rain. A cold howling night wrapped in a cloak of wet fur braced against the baying darkness. Ashes, and wood, and animal. She could hear the pacing of his heart. It tested the strength of the door. Gnawed on itself in frustration. 

For a moment she thought of how warm he would be with the fire out and the cold rain coming down. Dark wool. Long sharp features hewed and honed. They were needy claws dragging into the raw parts of her thoughts. She nearly yelped as he reached out to roll static over her shoulder. A pity that he couldn't get through. He withdrew looking for another way in. Tired. Needy. Hungry. Somehow the absence of the frisson on her skin betrayed her exterior of defiance with a greedy little moan for him. Unbidden. Unwelcome. Unavoidable. 

A panic rose in her at where these feelings wished to find their way. _Handfuls of dark hair._ She swam in a daze of how little she controlled them when she fell into these moments. _Tangled limb_ s. How she was nearly a different person here. _Insistent hips pressing_. How little the life she thought she wanted meant to her against this pull. _Quick breaths into straining shoulders._ How she felt so free here that being anything or anyone else was a prison. _Needy hands exploring. Down, down, down until full wild instinct sliced into her restraint_. Her eyes shuttered as she began to see clothes fall around her. She reached out with trembling hands and bolted the door of her mind.

Everything wrenched away. The idea of where they were going moments before hissed through her with empty loss. Her wilted senses being dragged out once more into the icy tide. He paused at the water's edge with sandy paws. The sound of his pacing became far far away.

She was so cold. Wet. She was soaked through. Shivering and hollowed out. She saw her master intent beyond the glowing aura of her blade in the haze. His eyes came into sharp focus on her as she returned to herself. She couldn’t remember when it had started to rain.

"Rey," it came as if he had said it many times with no reply, "are you there, Padawan?"

"Master,” her eyes fluttering as she returned from the fitful realm, “ It's getting stronger."

The trembling in her limbs made the lightsaber fall from her grip and clink into the crackled shale of their training grounds. Her arms burned, and she wondered how long she had been holding herself in that position. Her legs, finally giving out to the exhaustion of her exertions over the last few days, crumpled beneath her. She sat splayed on the damp mossy stone, head slumped, and heart racing.

Luke hesitated another moment before withdrawing his own blade and coming to kneel beside her. She stared down at her hand rolling her fingertips over the slick stones as she tried to force herself back into reality. Trying to almost find her way into the rocks, into the earth.

_Crack open and swallow me whole so I can rest. So I can escape this._

"Let's go."

Her Master’s voice brought her gaze swiveling slowly up to him, and his impassive face. She nodded. Luke Skywalker had no extra comfort to offer her. His eyes were those of a man always waiting for the next tragedy to unfold before them. She was almost as tired as he was. A chronic aching exhaustion. The kind that befalls people who know deep loneliness and deep love, but only ever expect the solitude.

She, however, still wandered in the place that youth afforded. A vast meadow of possibility, blooming in every color. Every opportunity. She had yet to dig her hands into the soil and build a temple to her future. She wanted it. Her master could sense that she believed she had laid out a foundation in her choosing to train with him. In reality her heart was ever the vagabond. It kept her in the present. Ever aware of what is. Saving what might be for tomorrow. She was still searching for the shape of her future. It gave her the energy Luke lacked. The kind that changes the world like he had once done with his companions. The kind that a man who was afraid of the future he had shaped lacked. Skywalker wondered what she would see when she found her potential, and who would be there beside her when she unleashed it.

“Come and sit with me.”

He had helped her back into the ruins where he had rebuilt one of the ancient structures into suitable shelter, and now he held out a earthen cup in metal fingers to her as he sat by the fire. She accepted it, pressing the rim of it to her chin so the steam inside drifted over her face. The robust smell of root and spice buried her in an old comfort she didn’t really understand. 

“Tell me,” he tried to smile soothingly though it looked awkward on his face, “do you think you can resist this thing?”

“I thought I was.” 

Her mouth moved to one side of her face, and then she knitted her brow sipping deep from the cup and trying to ignore the bitterness and heat. Her master waited for more. 

“I'm trying to at least.”

Luke looked for a moment as if he had some instant response to that, but he cut himself off. In this situation trying was all either of them could do. He had some knowledge of what was happening with this bond, but it wasn’t something that there was much information left on. It wasn’t something that had been of much importance to impart to him in his own training. He had been trying to find a source of knowledge on it now, but everything he discovered was easily known through simple observation of effect. 

“Hmm. Yes I suppose you are. I fear, because it weakens you so, that training is not something I should push for now. At least until this is under control.” 

“Master Skywalker, please! I’ve come so far. I finally feel like I know what I need to do. Please don't give up on me now. If I’m weakened surely he is to? Maybe we can use that to our advantage?”

A little knot cinched up inside her at the thought of it though. Somehow, now, she didn’t like the feeling of striking him down. She tried to think of the advantage as a way to bring him around to their side instead. It soothed the discomfort somewhat. Still, it was hardly a fully plausible idea after all he had done, and she didn’t like that thought either. 

“Striking at Kylo Ren when he is weak has an aggressive strategic merit, but as a practitioner of the light side I hardly see it’s defensive value. Beyond that, if he is weak then you are weak. You both have the same disadvantage.”

She looked down into her cup knowing how desperate and childish she must sound to have suggested such a thing. 

“Unless, you are saying I should run off to fight him while you stay here thinking at him as hard as you can.”

He let out a small chuckle at his proposed scenario. 

“I’m sorry Master. I thought maybe, you know, he might come around a bit.”

She edged a fingertip around the rim of her cup nervously.

“Somewhere deep down he can see the draw of the light again. When we share our feelings. With how strong those feelings are getting.”

She blushed at the last bit and tried to seem extremely interested in her drink once more. Luke hadn’t missed it, but delicately navigated around his Padawan’s sudden change in composure. 

“So is that what it is you think you are meant to do? Drag Kylo Ren back into the light by showing him your point of view.”

“I guess it sounds silly when you say it aloud.”

“It sounds idealistic. I’m not even sure if it’s something my training could help you with.”

His voice was dry and a little distant. She looked up at him ready to defend herself, and her determination to train with him, but his expression shut her down. She could tell he was debating on how to phrase his next words.

“Are you so sure your point of view is the light?”

Her features fell into a ubiquitous hurt.

“Are you not?”

A reply heavy with the weight his suggestion had levied on her heart.

“Your turmoil is like the color of stormclouds in the daylight. It is neither dark nor light. They followed you back from Starkiller, and they rain on you still.”

He sighed and ran his palm down his face, smoothing out his beard which was frizzing in the humidity of the firelit room. She stared into the warm dancing shadow of him on the wall.

“I’m not sure your heart knows where it belongs. Only moments ago in your life you were a girl who was waiting. The events that brought you here don't change that. You're a girl waiting on a purpose. You think you found it, but how will you achieve it?”

“You will train me. I can be a Jedi too. I can face the darkness like you did once. All these destiny's coalescing. It can’t be a coincidence. Isn’t this the way the force tells us how to bring balance?” 

“Are you ready for what that means? What it meant for me.”

“Isolation? I’ve done that. I’m can live with that.”

“Is that all?” 

He nodded with a sarcasticness that almost felt like bitterness. 

“You’ve seen the beginning of my conflict. A loss and a victory. The determination after. Now you wait like you’ve always waited, but this time for what to do next. What you think feels like the right thing to do next, because you have a good heart. A strong heart. A heart full of passion.”

She looked down and away from him. She knew he was right. He moved his hand up to scratch an itch that wasn’t really there. A frustration, and a want to make his point hit where it needed to. 

“Rey, I didn’t come here to this isolation with the intention of dragging someone else into my fate. I knew one day someone would come up those steps. I didn’t look forward to it. To giving someone else this burden. If you know what you want. If you want to fight for that. This doesn’t have to be the only way. It’s your turn to decide how the battle turns. What things are worth keeping. Forgiving. Protecting.”

He meant it. After what he had been through to rebuild the order. After what Kylo Ren had done. He wasn’t even sure if this was the way. He felt compelled to teach her. He did not feel compelled to trap her in those teachings. He wondered for a moment if that's what had turned Ben away in the first place.

“For now, no matter what you decide, we will be suspending training. Whether you leave here a Jedi or not I think I will always be able to consider you an ally and a friend, because I can feel your intent, and I believe in that.”

She smiled up weakly at him. Caught up in the exhaustion and frustration of her situation. Honored by his words, but also frightened by them.

“Thank you, Master. I hope I can live up to it.”

He sighed with a serious look. Lifting his bushy brow and rubbing the knuckle of his thumb over his temple he managed to find a tone that left behind some of the weight of his life. 

“You already have, Rey.”

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: a combination of "Blue Turning Grey," by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and "Bluebird", by Swan Lake.


	4. I Don't Love

**Warning:** This chapter has some violent themes, and grievous injury (though not described in detail)

___________

  


Rey couldn't sleep yet she swore she was dreaming. Everything real around her felt stagnant. Sinking like sediment to the bottom of the well. Trapped and still. Yet she was restless. A waterfall waiting to spill over. The connection boiled inside her. Neither of them could leave it unattended, and it steamed in shrilly through an ever focusing spout of intent. 

Her master was afraid she couldn't stop it. She was starting to agree. She felt Kylo Ren lose control too. He must be as frustrated as her. They both were so used to being strong. Self reliant. Now they were being pulled to the horizon of a flat and maddening world. Destiny was flinging them over the edge. 

Luke Skywalker had left her alone on a secluded island on the planet to meditate while he went off world to try and find something that could help her. Perched on the edge of a low sheer cliff she listened to the surf. She hadn't had much luck. She hoped he fared better. She wished now he was here. She feared the desperate feelings rising in her. She almost reached back to meet them. 

Was she heeding the call? With all the noise, was it really worth resisting. If it wanted to consume her, and him, maybe at least they could have some quiet if it did. 

Her unease made her turn over the words her Master had said to her after their last sparring match had ended so strangely. About how much she wanted to be like he had been. To carry the light in her heart. To make General Leia proud, and honor Han Solo. To stand with Finn and Poe and BB-8 and cheer to the fall of the First Order. 

_The fall of Kylo Ren?_

The last thought came with agitation. She wasn’t sure about him. About what her place was in relation to him. Certainly not an ally. Not an enemy. It's what made Luke right about her. She prickled at how unfair it seemed. It made her emotions spiral capriciously. How this ridiculous bond was confusing her purpose. He was taking it from her, like he said he could. She hoped Kylo could feel her fierce sense loss at the transgression. 

_This mistake._

Her head shook. She hadn’t meant the last part. Not really. This new thing, this unplanned hitch in her ideal, was slowly becoming its own new ideal. Legends were legends, and she had her own adventure to find. She knew it wasn't fair to expect herself to live up to the legacy of her idols. 

Then a sound came to her which was very real. A distinctive shriek in the sky above.

__________

He couldn't stand the way it all suffocated him. How she flushed him out just as they both began to surrender, only to start over. To call again. Waves of her mind washing over his feet standing on the shore as he sank heavily in the sand. The water pulled at his ankles, calling him into the opaque waters. Wanting to surround him. Swallow him. 

He leaned his head back weakly and cursed at the sky, because he wanted it too. 

_Wash me away! I'm done fighting it. Let's drown together if we must._

He was answered with roars of nothing. They had existed here before. Always together. Always in memories or in spaces between memories. In visions of desire. Steeped in the melody, the chiming ringing resonance, of everything they experienced together. In the echo of the words their mouths couldn't find but their hearts knew. Now it was as if they were being pulled away to disparate sides of the world they occupied. The same distances of their reality seeping through to this place. Each falling off the edge of their own side of sanity and will. Like all this buildup was betraying them.

She had sent mercurial vibrations of displeasure at him . Just as quickly as she had wanted she had rejected. Then again, a gentle sorrow, a whispered hope. He found his mood was just as unpredictable, shifting from short tempered to voracious as he thought of her. They hacked away at each other as the bond fell into a mad rush for some completion that it had yet to reveal. 

Then he felt a new unsteady trill flow over the waves. She sent a sound into his mind accusingly. The distinctive hiss of twin engines. TIE Fighters.

He was doused instantly in rage. It brought him fully back to the space he occupied in his master's new lair. A stale uncomfortable reality. His master had used his mind to find her. He had barely just arrived a day ago and in his moments of proximity Snoke had stolen her from his mind like he had taken her for himself from Takodana. The particular parallel made his chest tighten. 

Then he had two thoughts. First was a rising excitement. Surely they would bring her here to his master. To him. A breathy sound escaped him. Then quickly, the second thought came. He felt immediately foolish. She wouldn't go without a fight. It seared over the current weakness of his everything. He thought of how she must be just as spent. She would certainly try and fight, but could she?

He reached down to his side. Soothing his hand over the wound that throbbed there. It took him a moment. It hit him so hard he couldn't breath. The pain was coming from the wrong side. The wrong person. 

__________

Rey looked down. She peeled her hand away from her side. It was slick and sticky and it bloomed red. Like Kylo Ren had in the snow. Light danced at the edge of her vision as the vital warmth in her spilled out onto the ground.

Something far away screamed out for her. She couldn’t quite feel it. She was so numb. Everything was so numb.

The trooper who had shot her, he made her picture Finn. She wondered if this man knew what it was to have a name. The shiny chrome of his captain's armor flashed aggressively at her subordinate’s grave error as she gesticulated her displeasure. Two others stalked toward Rey as her weapon slipped from her hand and deactivated.

The fading drone of the desperate call over her mind fell further away. She missed the sound now.

She couldn't help but look away. Tilting her head up to the heavens and replacing her hand over the escaping life. A perplexing joy began to wash over her. Above, the sky looked as if it reflected her mood in a pool of light, and the crisp air stood still as a lonely moon crept into the vastness. 

_Please!_ His voice came like closed hands over empty air.

She let herself fall backwards into the sea. Everything was new. She gave a strangled smile. It felt like returning home. 

Everything outside of her had been cut away. Everything inside her too. 

She moved through a field. The tall grass tickled her outstretched arms as she ran her fingers over the fronds. Her feet were bare, and wherever she stepped a bed of soft flowers rose to meet her stride. In glee, she started to bound up through the meadow in tiny flighty hops. Fragrant petals flurried behind her swirling through the air. Before she knew it she was running full speed, slicing through the frozen moment, giggling with her face to the stars and her hair flowing behind her. 

She felt perfectly in place in a perfect moment. Her eyes saw the stars for all their magic and majesty. Her heart felt like it was overflowing. Every bit of her was euphoric, and she brimmed with every feeling. She had never felt so much love, and pain all at once.

She spun until she couldn't stand. Collapsing in dizzy fits to the grass as the petals snowed down on her. Laying on her side she could see the earth under her grow wet with red. From the coppery petrichor a little glow pushed itself from the earth. As it yawned from its slumber she felt a message in it. Like a voice far away calling out to the pain she couldn't remember here. 

It bloomed there in front her. A perfect promise. _I'll do anything_ , it whispered. 

Her fingers brushed its glowing petals. They gripped its slender stem. She plucked it from the earth, and then she was gone.

___________

Kylo Ren would have truly sacrificed anything then. When the pain had given way to incomprehensible emptiness. He reeled from the loss of even the madness. At least it was something. 

When she had disappeared so much of him had followed. Like an essential function to his survival had been expunged and he had to pick up the slack. Like breathing with his heart, or seeing with his hands. It was so wrong. The last sun had been sucked dry, and now he feared the dark. 

He had been thrown so far from himself he was seeing Ben's memories. His youthful hand reaching out in apology to a smiling child with teary eyes laying on her back in the fading light of day. Her earnest confusion when later he'd turned his back on everything. He'd failed her again. 

I won't break any more promises. I'll fix it. I'll make it right. This is the last. Just come back. Be real again, because I need you more than what I've made. _I'll do anything._

Then, like a match struck in the dark, he smelled sulfur and saw light. It didn't even phase him as he was drained from reality and sucked into the dark void below him. He fell away from one darkness and into another. He didn't mind- because the further he fell, the more he felt her.

He knew what he wanted now. He knew why all the choices he had made mattered, and why they hurt, and who they hurt. He felt which he could make right, and which he would atone for. How he would atone. Now though he didn’t matter. She mattered. His promise mattered. She had accepted his gift, and now he rode on top of the thundering hooves of the darkness that consumed them both to retrieve her.

__________

_Scrambled senseless senses. Breaths rejected briny sea water. Coughing torrents tortured open wounds winding deep in the burning back of ribs rolling to a stop to pause in a time built only for a feeling concentrated entirely in that moment and composed only of the thought of regaining the air missing from the current breath._

_Breathe_

_In sharply. Same as pain. Same as drowning._

_Breathe_

_Sweet simple breath. Expanded chest. Expanded wound._

_Gasp_

_Blood. Sticky thick. Warm. At once precious air regained becomes panic._

_Breathe_

_Now shallow. Now slow. Pleading her mind screams!_

_BREATHE_

A fuzzy white light extended out from her body where she clutched a single brilliant blossom. It currently served only to highlight the newly closing darkness.

From the gloom opened a great fissure, and out of it rose a form of terror and triumph. 

Then a voice ushered in stillness.

"Has an arrow found you in the dark?"

The lingering illumination cast feathered shadows behind the sloping knuckles of battle worn hands. Gently they slid beneath neck and leg, and hoisted her into the air from the sea and close to his chest.

He wore the appearance of Kylo Ren, just as she wore Rey’s in whatever place it was they were. In whatever roles they had found themselves encompassed by. 

His was a face so full of foreign tenderness. He balanced her drenched form with easy strength. Stepping up gracefully into his saddle he cradled her as he seated his ghastly mount. Just before he urged the beast to return into the gulf from which he had appeared he attempted to reassure her. 

"Now, so I may keep a promise, let us master death."

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter Title Song: "I Don't Love", by Have a Nice Life  
Silly little reference to my other fic "You Are My Sunshine" in Ben's memories.


	5. Wet Wings

**Warning:** mention of blood/injuries (but not in detail)

  


_Pain. Awareness of pain._

_Awareness._

_Warmth swaddled fragile extremities. Familiar limbs. Hands. Feet. Delicate skin. Already pierced._

_Identity. Awareness of identity._

_Self._

She knew herself. Rey. Not Rey. Memories and knowledge were mixed with new instinct, filling her mind with an additional sense of self, muddled with a fast retreating normalcy.

All her thoughts felt distantly analytical. An intentional barrier.

_I know what I am. I know how I should function here. I feel aware of the rituals of this nature, and yet I am still Rey. I come from Jakku. I am not these new thoughts or this place and yet it is familiar. I don’t remember coming here. Falling into the sea. I was Spring in the meadow. A promise ... Kylo Ren!!_

She instantly pushed away all the new things her mind was telling her must be true. She insisted to herself that Kylo Ren had plucked the bloody mess of her from the sea. He must have come with the Stormtroopers. He carried her away...again. She realized she was laying on her back, wrapped in warm fabric, on a soft surface. Probably in some med bay. 

Her eyes fluttered open and she blinked in the vast darkness. For a fierce moment she thought she had gone blind. Instead, as her eyes moved away from the starless sky above her, she could see massive stone walls curving up into the darkness. They were carved in brilliant heavy reliefs that weaved between sharp and sleek, and wound into chaotic and natural. Not a med bay.

_An Underworld._

Her mind provided the answer. New knowing. The threads in her head created tangled thoughts. Her amplified emotions were straining against the idea of what had happened. How it went against everything she understood.

This place wasn't like her previous experiences with their visions- she could already sense it in the vast well of emotions she had endured just since regaining consciousness, yet they were all in a vacuum. Just her, but more her then there used to be. She knew she shouldn't just know so much, or feel so much, but there it was at her beck and call.

_There it all was. At once._

Uninvited tears laid wet trails on her pallid cheeks. The sudden rush of feeling had left a soft tint of color in her face though. Then, a vertigo raged over her. She rolled to her side, despite her pain, crumpling in on herself from the inability to relieve her spasming stomach of its empty content. 

_Me. Not me._

She had been entirely in her own mind to that point, but the touch of a hand on her shoulder made her thoughts buckle and her body shrink in surprise that she had not sensed a presence.

"Please, try not to move. There are no medical supplies here. The bandaging I was able to make is woefully inadequate."

Kylo Ren’s hand pressed firmly on her shoulder to encourage her to return to laying. She stayed still bathed in an odd fear. She was propped up on her side out of her warm bundle- the cloak lying around her. She felt a bit exposed as he stared at her, his mask discarded.

“You feel it too I assume? This strange place. A new identity wears us like a costume.”

Rey nodded. Yes, she felt it too. It ran an undercurrent of fear and flightiness into her. She was unaccustomed to shrinking away from conflict, but this felt more like the ancient animal need to survive. To do that, her mind told her, was to leave this place. To get away from him. She felt an immense instinctual need to run even though she could barely breath without pain.

Another divergence from their typical experience in these visions. It had always made her painfully confused how drawn to him she had been in their shared moments. Now she didn’t even feel his thoughts, at least not in the sense of a connection. However, the way his hand and his eyes lingered on her sent a message she didn’t need to hear from his mind. This elicited the recoil she had always expected his proximity should.

He withdrew from her in turn. An expression flashed across his face, so small and so quick, she almost missed it. It looked like hurt. She was lost for a moment that she couldn't feel what it had been. It made her almost want to apologize for her rebuff. She curled her bottom lip under, biting it a bit.

“What now?”

He snatched something from the air. A white petal. He rolled it between his fingers, and shrugged dejectedly as another few floated down on his shoulders and in his hair. She realized she was covered in them as well, and they blanketed the dark smooth floor all around them as they floated down from nowhere. The stone slab she laid on was overgrown with vegetation. It bloomed beneath her with paper whites, except for where the bandages failed, and blood stained their faces. 

As she sat up to survey her surroundings, wincing in pain, the blush of red beneath her drew his eyes again. He watched her inspect herself. As if she was performing a ritual. She ran fingers over the dark wrappings at her waist. Then looked over at him with curious eyes, scrutinizing him, until she reached the hem of his tunic. He had torn at it to create the wrap around her. A sacrifice which sent the corners of her lips pulling up softly as she closed her eyes once more. She looked so peaceful except the tears escaping again under her lashes. The pain in her side was so strong, and no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t find the place in her mind that usually allowed her to push it down. The connection was quite, the force was quiet. 

“You won't be able to meditate it away.”

Her head snapped around at him, a desperate panic on her face. A frown whispered over his expression.

“I’m sorry.” He added, looking down.

“There must be something? We were pulled into this place for a reason. It’s taken away so much, and it’s put so many new things in place. What do you feel? What’s it telling you?”

She could feel the new things that her mind told her were here. The life springing up at her very presence. The sadness that she felt at knowing that, should she remain here, she may never see the sun again. The fear of him beyond the face of Kylo Ren. A different reluctance. She couldn’t sort it out. What it really meant.

“It calls to me, it names me master of Death, and this place is my home.”

Rey’s unease gave quickly to the curiosity that she had understood him. Not just an understanding of what he said but what it meant in the context of this world. He stared at her in a new way. His eyes held so much urgency. An aching yearning. They were a profession of the words he held back when he finished his thought.

“More than anything, I feel the incessant pull of Spring.” 

 

\----------

 

The mania of their delusion no longer pulled at him here. It was an entirely new delirium. His answer to her had been holding back so so much. The realization of this place may not have fully sunken in for her yet, but he knew exactly what it told him he craved. _Her._

Whatever the part he had to play in this...whatever this was, it certainly felt true enough. He had made a promise, and this is where it had taken them. He had to figure out how this place intended him to fulfill that promise, because that was his purpose now.

When he had finally accepted that he had been devoured into the abyss. When his hope had returned at feeling her again, and the earth had opened up gulping in seawater as he stood beside her. How she was floating in the shallow tide of black ink, bleeding out. How he needed to bring her to a place where he could freeze them in the moment before it all escaped. All the life she had left. It was as good an excuse as any to lift her close to him. To press her body into his heart beat. Then the chasm opened up, and he carried her home into the murky terminus of the earth.

Home. An endless sky without stars. He knew she’d hate that. He remembered how often the starry sky above her head had washed over his mind when she was trying to ease the intensity of the growing bond. The place was vast though. He tried to remember something he had never experienced- a place he could show her that would ease the oppression inherent in his Underworld. 

He figured now was as good a time as any to venture further into the void. 

“Do you think you can move?”

She tested herself, edging over to hang her legs off the top of the slab, holding one hand firmly over the wound. It bled still, making the black swath of fabric shine with wetness. He hated the pain in her eyes which she was diligently trying to ignore. He pursed his lips taking a quick breath through his nose. It wasn’t right. He moved to stop her.

“Nevermind, don’t push yourself.”

Ignoring her previous aversion he came a step away from parting her knees with his hips. Something he actively tried not to think about when he was this close, because he wanted it so painfully bad. She was surely thinking of it, for her cheeks had flushed a bit as her big eyes glanced down at where he had positioned himself, and then back up to his face in abject dread. He pointedly neglected to react. 

“I’m going to try something. I’ll be gentle. Please, stay still.”

If she could have, he was sure she would have been squirming at that. Instead she shrank up into herself as much as possible as he reached his fingertips out to her wound. It all felt a little familiar. Her eyes stayed on his face, wide through long lashes, but his concentration remained on the terrible little hole in her side. 

“Ow! Please, can you not? Is there any reason to be groping around?”

“Yes.”

“Care to..ow, ow, OW!” She grabbed at his wrist, “Explain!”

She demanded it. He was hoping it would have just worked. Explaining would be more difficult. He didn’t mind the forceful way she held his arm though. He sighed.

“It’s not supposed to keep hurting.”

She looked at him like he was stupid. There was a hole. In her body. Of course it hurt. Then a strange understanding nudged its way into her features.

“Wait. Is it because I’m not... _dead_?”

It was an interesting conclusion. In the afterlife, in the Underworld, the dead wore the wounds that had claimed their lives. Just like she did. The difference being that theirs no longer bled, nor did they cause any pain. The spirits of his domain wandered endlessly wearing their worst moments frozen in time. Her clothes were practically sanguine now. Her draining color. Her painful noises. He was actually beginning to fear that it would stop, and then she would be another lost creature here. For now, she was alive in the land of death, and he was going to asure it stayed that way.

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: “Wet Wings” , by Dan Deacon


	6. The Freedom to Die of Wanting

  


Rey thought his face looked awfully determined. Set in an expression of serious contemplation, but laced with the deeply unnerving thought of how little time they had before she would be in trouble. Somehow it had turned the fact of how very close he was to her, and how she was sitting, and how he ran insistent hands over her wound into something less agonizing. It almost eased the pain to let the familiarity of his proximity reaffirm itself. 

She was still frightened though. When she first became aware of this place, when she awoke, she was sure she had died. Had been carried to the Underworld by a reaper. It was almost how she thought of him anyway. Kylo Ren the avatar of the end. Darkness. 

It had been a weird sort of relief when the revelation hit her. She wasn't dead. Kylo Ren had just kidnapped her. Again. The man certainly had a modus operandi. Now, instead of all the death that loomed around her she thought of the constant ache. It was the indication that she still held onto life. Even if just barely. _Pain is just a reminder you're still alive. Ha! Said someone who was never shot by a blaster._ She tried to be lighthearted but there was the frightening part. That as time passed, the pain became more distant. Not from relief but from fading. Her fading. She felt like a candle about to be blown out.

“Rey, do not fall asleep.”

Kylo Ren had said her name. Not girl, or scavenger. His voice was like cool water being splashed on her face. The floating fragmented feeling still remained, but she fought just a little harder to keep it away. Though she wouldn’t mind hearing her name across his lips again. Still, her head bobbed forward as she fell asleep, and then jerked back up as she forced herself awake. 

She took her hand off her wound and rubbed at both of her cheeks to wake herself up. It left a little ruddy stain over her freckles. She saw the way Kylo was looking at her, paler than usual. His jaw set. It was obvious he wanted to do something, but couldn’t. Probably a few things. It gave her a weak smile, which she flashed up to him.

“You are strong. I know this to be true. So fight this. Fight it like it's something I’m doing to you.”

Her brows furrowed at that, but a wide grin split her face. He was teasing her. Now? She had been taken aback that he was even capable. 

“You aren’t nearly as hard to ignore. A pain in the side to be sure though.”

He quirked a brow for a flash of a second, and this sent her into a little chuckle that was just enough to send a new rush of warmth to her side as the wound reasserted itself in her consciousness. Fireflies danced along her peripheral vision, and suddenly she was glad he was standing so very close.

When she could feel herself coming back around, shaking off the haze, she was met with the scratchy texture of wool on her cheek. She could feel his posture stiffen underneath her as her palms flexed on the rough texture at his chest. He didn’t move, as if some poisonous snake had been tossed onto him, and he hoped if he didn’t move it would just slither away.

“Thats...strange.”

She managed to whisper her confusion as she struggled to push herself away, and save them both the indignity of it all. Instead the pain thrust into her mind. The only thing she could feel or be. It was so frustratingly engrossing. Her energy drained, her thought, her composure failing. She wondered if his hesitation to move or touch her now was due to her earlier rejection or his fear of hurting her. Probably both. She still found it funny how hot and cold he was with physical proximity.

“Would you mind, um...could, you please help me up?”

Suddenly his state of attention eased. His demeanor did another jarring turn. One arm wrapped behind her shoulder as if he intended to embrace her. Repositioning himself so his hips were beside where her legs dangled from the table her pushed his chest into her and she lightly fell back into the steady arm he held at her back. Then, in one quick sweep, he twisted his torso and bent down putting his free arm under her knees, pulling her up into his arms. 

There was a quick rush of pain, she saw it in his face more then she felt it in her body. He was being so careful. It was him wincing at her pain instead of her. She felt a swoon come over her. She tried to tell herself it was the blood loss. She knew it had a lot to do with how much he was fussing over her. How soft he was being. How secure she felt for the first time since she had started to have the feelings they had shared over the bond. A warm ease. 

“We have a ways to go to actually pass through the gates. There are more accommodations there. It's possible we can even send for help. I don’t think it would be wise for you to walk.”

She nodded up at him with cheeks that felt ever so slightly warm now. She winced a little at his first steps. Squirming slightly in his grasp.

“I know this isn’t ideal. Let me know if we need to stop.”

He was being as nimble as he could. She had to do her part to push it back the old fashioned way. She clenched her teeth and wrapped her fists into the loose fabric at his chest. The hurt was greedy. It wasn’t long before she was burrowing her face near the crook of his arm. The pressure on her head distracting from the hurt. He tightened his grasp ever so slightly at her actions, clutching her. It was anger. Not at her, but at his helplessness, she guessed. The face he was making was that of a man about to punch a wall. 

She relaxed herself a bit, and then almost nuzzled into his chest softly. She had intended to reassure him that it wasn't so bad. Instead she found it comforted her. Strong and steady. It caused her to let out a little satisfied sound, like a hum. She felt a quick flush of embarrassment at having curled up into him with so much familiarity. It had just come so easy to feel _normal_ around him here and in their visions. They had been in so many places inside each others mind. They were probably as close to one another as people who had known eachother for years and years. _More like lovers who have never touched_ . The voice in her head had caused her cheeks to turn fully rosey now. It was ok though. His were just a bit too, and his heartbeat had gotten so quick. 

“I’m being trouble. I’m sorry you have to carry me.”

She tested him a bit to see if she wasn’t just imagining it. She sighed again, closing her eyes and pushing the back of her head into him, she let her fingertips fall softly over his heart, and she gave the most content of little smiles she could manage with the pain. She felt his heart pound even more. He let out a little disapproving sound from his throat, and her heart sank a bit.

“You couldn’t have walked all this way. I wasn’t going to leave you to die.”

It was an awfully cold of him, considering how he held her so possessively. She peered up through her eyelashes at his face, expecting scorn for her playful teasing, but instead seeing him looking intently ahead with a mighty blush across his cheeks. She liked the way it made the constellation of freckles on his face more apparent. 

So instead of teasing him further she just nodded into his arm.

“Thanks, then.” 

His almost reserved reaction brought her a bit of renewal. The hints of his brightest humanity under all that pomp and training. She couldn't help but focus on his footfalls, and his heartbeat, and how he would worriedly tighten his fingers around her at any sign of her discomfort. She decided it would drive her mad if she didn’t fill some of the silence.

“So, this. All of this,” her eyes pivoted around to take in the view, “I guess we just go along with it then?”

His eyes studied her for a moment. He seemed to be trying to judge why she was asking. What her angle was.

“If we want to escape it. Yes, I imagine there isn't much of a choice. We’ve established it isn’t just another shared vision. There’s some other story this game is playing at.” 

Well, he wasn’t trying to sugar coat it.

“So we really are just here this time. Then what? So, we play through this tale. To what end? Some happily ever after?” 

He didn’t try very hard to hide the expression her last question gave him. Half cheeky grin under a somewhat wistful stare. 

“Well, it's a very optimistic outlook, and now you’ve gone and guessed my endgame. Though I imagine yours still eludes you.”

She ignored his comment, assuming he was teasing her. _Happily ever after with Kylo Ren, huh?_ she rolled her eyes internally.

“This game hardly seems fair. How can I win if I don’t even know what it is I’m playing?” 

“Well, I won't complain if that means I have an advantage.”

“Oh, so its ok to win by cheating? I see how you play. I can assume we can add loosing to your list of fears.”

He gave her a slightly cold stare, but she noticed as soon as he looked at her and the pouty face she must be wearing, any real sting to her words was wiped away. So she turned her head from him and blurted out a grudging request.

“Care to share? You were going on before about teaching and the force and blah blah blah.”

He stopped temporarily and leaned his head away pretending to be taken aback by her vitriolic huffing. Not to mention her demand for his advice. She had put her fist on her chin and scowled a bit. He met her attitude with a dripping profesoral condescension.

“It certainly isn’t my fault if you aren’t well versed in strategy. Let me offer you a lesson. You may wish to abstain from telling your opponent how little you know. It demonstrates both your lack of knowledge, and control.” 

“Oh, so you know? You get how this all works? So I basically have to sit back and wait for you to get us out of this mess?! Worse yet, you think we are competing- for who knows what that you've made up in that twisted mind of yours. But. But! You won't share it with me. Kylo can’t play nice with others. No way. No, sir. I will figure it out. Don’t let our current state fool you. I will not bleed out in KYLO REN’S ARMS IN THE FUCKING UNDERWORLD! YOU HEAR ME?!!”

She had turned to scream out at the adversarial nothing, and then they were both completely silent for a long while.

Then he let out a sound that reminded her an awful lot of a laugh. There it was again! He was laughing at her. Then, another moment, and he was laughing with her. The deep throaty sounds of it echoing as they fell into convulsed chortles through the vast and quiet corridors. 

His face looked a bit smug after their exchanged when it finally all died down, which had taken quite a lot of time as they would stop only to fall into fits again. He finally peered down at her with sparkling eyes. It made her think about how long it had been since he had laughed to tears. Or her for that matter. Little petals rained down on them again shifting the mood.

“Do you control that?”

He asked turning his head to the sky as a few pale blossoms rolled down his face into her lap.

“I don’t know.”

She answered in an awed voice. She knew it must be her. It made her happy to see them. She completely forgot how she had felt moments before. Now she caressed his face, and his jaw, and down the back of his shoulder in the feeling of every petal falling over him. He shivered as they spiraled against him almost as if she was truly grazing her fingers over him. A contact they could both enjoy in chaste revelry free of their guilty wanting. 

As he moved through the flurry she could feel a floral breeze full of petals pushing at their back. Gently urging them on. She could feel long dormant seeds of life in the soil wishing to cast off their graves of dirt to greet her. To worship the sun in the darkness. She understood. It was all finally clear. She was the spring to his deathly winter. He could posses her as she withered in the darkness, or she could return to the light alone. 

He stopped suddenly as if struck by her revelation, her heart barely had time to hurt. Instead she saw his eyes fell upon a colossal doorway. It made her feel uneasy that the path they were on seemed narrow, and elevated with infinite darkness above and below and to all sides. It was just them, the ground beneath their feet, and the looming gate. Moony white it glowed with a pale and uninviting aura.

“Is everything alright?”

She was confused by the sudden loss of color in his face. The nervous searching of his eyes.

“Yes. It’s just,” he rolled his tongue over his lips, “this is the place where one enters into… _my_ realm. The threshold to my home.”

Then she understood. What it would symbolically mean if he carried her through that archway. How all of this was the start of the story. It was a bit late though, all this new understanding, because as he said it she twisted just the wrong way in his arms to reopen her wound angrily. His grip had loosened in his nervous pause at the gate, and he immediately fiercely clung to her again at her sharp inhale.

She pressed into his chest, and let out a strange sorrowful groan. Long and throaty. It was funny how close pain and pleasure could sound.  
____

He shivered at it. A beautiful sound for an ugly hurt. With her rolling spasms he kneeled to the ground to better support her against the wracking pain. Blood pooled in the crook of his arm, and dripped onto the ground.

Then he saw it, over the edge of her. Surrounding her. The little light. A silver lining. All the petals that had blanketed her began to multiply. Spinning inward into beautiful glimmering buds that looked as if they grew from within her. They blossomed. They threw out tiny stars covering her unconscious body in the pale white glow. He held fast. Unwilling to interrupt whatever breathtaking magic she weaved.

He gawked openly at her. This was the beauty that had drawn him across reality just so he might be close to it just one more time. The stars burned inside her soul with a light that he so desperately promised would never be extinguished. That she was the true light inside him that he could never relinquish. The only feeling that mattered, and he had realized it nearly too late, when it had been taken away. When only moments ago, as she bled again, he was so certain the end of his second chance was soon to pass. 

He felt a tear boil over and run down his cheek into the garden that had begun to inhale her.  
It bounced off the edge of a sleek narcissus bloom, and froze in the air quivering. All the light in the stars that the flowers had shed as they opened drew into it causing it to grow. It refracted light all around them as bands of every color multiplied their original brilliance. 

The blossoms finally began to almost melt away form her under its rippling incandescence. As they slid away he saw her face again, pink, and kissed with freckles. Warm skin under his hands. As if she had been bathed in a well of the noonday sun. Her bloodied clothes were gone too. Replaced by what seems like trailing silk as the the flowers fell from her, hanging off the strands of it. She was draped in diaphanous white that rained with a constant flow of snowy petals more numerous as they reached the bottom which draped richly over his arms.

It was her. Perfect her. Healed healthy glowing her. 

He noticed lastly the bright orb, that her light and his sorrow had made, descend into the upwardly open palm of her hand. Coming to rest on the remnants of a scrap of black which had been her bandage, and his surcoat before. It laid on the cloth and seemed to soak away all the blood it had tried to hold back, coalescing into a brilliant carmine hued gem. Then she closed her palm around it, and blinked up at him.

His composure ruptured inside him. Shattering into primitive instinct, he thought of standing, taking her straight through those doors and into his bed. The last bits of his mind called out for a reason not to, called to his promise, but his ears were already ringing with other compulsions.

“Hades?”

The name this place whispered to him given her voice. He recoiled from his thoughts to hear the question. Not of the identity. That had not been the question. She knew it, he knew it. It was her asking him if she could ask. The precursor to a request. 

“Yes? Persephone, light in my darkness.”

“Will you take me home?”

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: A line from the song “Ledmonton”, by Clues  
whoo that was a long chapter, I'd like to keep this up now that the pace of the story is less frantic and manic like their earlier visions 


	7. Oh Death

  


The question hitched inside him.

_Would he take her home?_

All the possibilities of what that meant to her. She made no move to clarify the request as she let her soft surveying eyes linger on him. Studying him. She was playing the game now. He admired her strategy.

She was letting him choose. Giving him the freedom to interpret her intent. His answer, his hesitation, would tell her so much and he knew it. Did she mean the sun soaked meadows above? A place he could never return. Was home even further? The place where her friends waited. Where his enemies waited. Or Jakku, or any other place, a reality away from them. A place he had poisoned for himself. So, so far from anything he could have with her. Maybe, she could mean the new home he was hoping to build here? At least for now. While he had her close. Where there was none of the complicated truth of their politics and personal choices.

_Is it really ok to just be selfish?_

The answer had not time to form in his head, and before he could reason it away he stood. Swooping her up, still in his arms, she let out a startled gasp. Thankfully it was no longer from pain. He then easily readjusted her in his arms to where she was sitting more than lying. It forced her to swing her arms around his neck for balance. The touch made him stand up straighter, squaring his shoulders. He only hesitated under her scrutiny a moment before his expression steeled and he took the few long strides he needed to reach the doors.

Standing with her just before the arching ivory entryway he looked back into her eyes. Bright. Renewed. Curious. He searched for any hesitation. Any sign that he had misread her intent. That she in fact truly was content to let him make this choice for both of them. He moved his eyes over her patient expression, quiet and steady. He tried to match her calm as she took in his face in turn. As her cheeks tinted pink under the ferocity of him. He couldn't manage. Everything about her screamed out to him. He nearly dug his fingers into her, like she was the only thing anchoring him from just floating away. He thought for a moment that should he let her go, she might burst into blossoms and blow away in the breeze.

He managed to pull back into his mind just enough to look forward. Move forward. The doors creaking open at his presence.

“Are you sure?”

He kept his head forward afraid he'd lose his nerve, but his eyes moved to her. He needed to reaffirm that this was all real, at least in its own way. A most inviting smile spread across her lips. It flashed across his senses like a whip, and spurred him through the archway. She never took her eyes off of him. Her expression stayed so serene.

As he heard the doors crash shut behind him he looked down again to see a dazzling red glow emanated from her palm which rested open in her lap. The red gem shot out ribbons of light that tangled around them, and bound them tightly. Then the rays of light burst into embers, rolling sparks down them, and he felt something familiar in his mind.

_The connection!_

It hadn't returned fully by any means. It felt more like deja vu. Instead of the implicit whole feelings they used to share, the visions which gorged themselves on his mind, he now saw the idea of a feeling in his head. How a certain song could remind you of a golden moment in time. The way the smell of leather reminded him of his father. Or how when he dreamt of mossy green woods he would feel her in his arms. From her now he felt something that flitted between the fear of waking up in an unfamiliar place, and the comfort of the warm blanket wrapped around you that keeps the cold away. 

His choice frightened her. It had taken her somewhere unfamiliar, and it opened up before her with all its new possibility. He chose instead to focus on the comfort. It was only expected that she might be afraid to face an unknown. What he hadn’t expected was how it was him that gave her comfort from that fear. His arms wrapping around her kept the cold immensity away. It filled him with a sense of triumph. She was content here. 

He held her a bit tighter. Drinking in the retreating discomfort it caused in her like strong wine. It emboldened him further. There was a little tug from her aura as he leaned his face close to hers. An unspoken wish to follow through. As always though, he felt her maddening hesitation grating over him just as he was close enough to feel her breaths against his face. He sensed the distress of it from her too, how her heart raced, but her mind needed something more. 

“You've made your choice,” her dry mouth made her lips click as they opened, and she moved light fingertips slowly down his jaw; as if soothing a wild creature, “Am I still free to make my own?”

He furrowed. What was she getting at? A proclamation of his actions. A spoken vow to seal the unspoken ritual of carrying her over the threshold of his kingdom. Was there something she wanted to possess or do? She didn’t need to ask him for any permissions. 

“My choice was a promise not a prison. You are my guest. Do as you please.”

He had carried her into his home. She knew what it meant, and she had let him choose it. For all intents and purposes, in this world, he had claimed her in marriage. Proclaimed it. There was only one act that could make it whole. Final. He threw up all his guards to hold back the furiously burning intent that even the idea of that brought over him. To send that spiking heat over their fragile reforming connection would only serve to make him appear to be all she thought he was before. So he waited, perched on the edge of a shudder, to hear what choice she wanted him to know.

“So, if I am free, then am I free to leave as well?”

He was livid with himself. His fingers reflexively curled into her harshly trying to make fists. Trying to find a hold on her that could take back those words. He darkly wished he had just kissed her before she had found a reason to falter in her initial wanting intent. 

_As if a ritual means anything to her heart. That I thought I could make her want me by wanting her. How dull I am._

“Do as you please.”

Was the only answer he could manage through clenched teeth. He practically hissed it at her. His posture went rigid and he let go of the arm under her legs so quickly she barely had time to find her feet. She unwound her arms from him, taking a step back. She must have sensed his dangerous temper. He would never involve her in it. So when she had stood clear of him it was a new affront. He asked himself if he had he given her much reason to think he wouldn’t. It stirred a pain in him. 

Now he needed a release, and before he realized it his legs had spun him around and carried him away from her. Without another word he stalked into the darkness leaving her standing in the entryway completely nonplussed. He felt her make no move to follow.

He seethed. After all the stolen touches, and prurient visions, he had been so caught off guard by her abrupt rejection. That her first words to him once they had passed through the gate, after they had reestablished their connection, had been to ask to leave. He paused in his angry stomping and balled his fist before sending it into the wall nearest him. Dusty ancient stone crumbled at his outburst. She had played the game well. He had made a fool of himself. 

_Maybe this is it._

Maybe in his final grasping wish his promise had been fulfilled. It was this. To attone was to cast his heart down into the depths of Tartarus. Being right there, but never having. That should he want to be with her in any way at all he would have to break every part of the person inside him who had made the promise. To keep her here. To trap her. To take her. She would not only reject him then, but she would truly and wholly hate him. He’d hate himself. That's what made it all so vile and cruel. It was a perfect suffering. 

The part of him that he thought he had killed long ago had given him a moment to hope. It had shown him a chance to make _them_ , and not just her and him. To fix themselves. To heal the bleeding wound the bond had become, and create something new. Something worth keeping. Something worth staying for. He’d promised he’d do anything. He swore to it. He swore to make her well, and happy, and to make them whole. To make something she wanted, and he wanted. Her wanting him. 

_I fucked up._

If not in showing the boldness in his intent, certainly he had by not giving her a reason to stay. The defeat in that thought had caused him to fall into an ever greater melancholy. A strange black fire began to burn around him, and he became like air as it carried him the rest of the way to the steps of his palace.

The structure dominated the skyline in the center of his kingdom above all other things. As his body reconstituted from the flames he climbed the broad smooth steps of dark matte stone that passed into the massive portico. It’s monumental columns of onyx were intricately adorned with gold and seemed to guard the entrance. It was all like a temple built to worship an overwhelming display of wealth. Rightfully so, for all the veins that glittered below the earth were his domain.

Despite the designs intent to awe and intimidate, for him it was warm, and embraced him in the feeling of home. He felt a relief as he reached the innermost room which was sprawling and open like a cathedral. A sanctum that yawned like an echoing cavern of splendor. It boasted ornately coffered ceilings of polished bronze so bright that every angle reflected warm light like a prism onto the wealth of fine trappings below. Raw cyprus trunks, gnarled and knotted, twisted like tormented bones stretching their limbs into naturally flowing shapes which created the base for most of the furnishings. Everything was draped in rich dark textiles, and he sank into the deep seat of the nearest chair putting his head into his hands, enjoying the comfort.

Sleek stone mingled with metal fittings and architectural ornamentation which cut clean lines back into all the chaos. Pulling through the motif to soothe the tortured frenzy in the pure decadence of it all. He sat up smoothing his hand over the sharp angle of the side table and snapped his finger. He didn’t have to wait long for warm violet light to burst from the braziers lining the chamber. 

Without sound a decanter of wine was set upon the table beside him, and his outstretched hand was met with a full cup. He drank deeply as he looked toward the ornate apse at the end of the room where his bed stood atop the platform where an altar would wait had his bedchamber truly been a church. Waiting for its sacrifice. Above, the half dome of the nook was covered in gold leafed carvings of the drama of the heavens against glistening cobalt stone, and from it hung a chandelier of pale gems that floated like gleaming stars raining down upon whoever laid beneath them. 

_She would like that._

The thought of it caused his temper to flare again. She should be here, taking in the sumptuousness of it all beside him. Lying beneath the stars that belong to him. That he would give to her. Lying beneath him. He squeezed the goblet and his hand began to burn white hot. Boiling the contents away. Melting the gilded vessel. It lay in a sad puddle on the mirror polished floors. 

He thought of her. Her reached out to her. She felt lost. Sitting on the ground at the gate.

_At the gate. She hadn’t left? Why?_

He sat at attention and reached into his mind to see the place where she sat in a meadow that had grown around her with the ivory gates behind her. This wasn’t the connection, he could survey his realm at will, and now he chose to watch her. With great intensity. She was solemn. She ran her fingers into the soft earth making a pit. Unfurling the black cloth she picked the little red gem from its folds with reverence between thumb and forefinger. Drawing it up she let what little light that filtered into this place bounce through it, and then she brought it to her lips. Kissing it, and then burying it beneath the soil.

He felt it. He felt her kiss ghost over his lips. He moaned with want. 

His vigil was broken in the feeling. A thick syrupy joy crawled over him in the aftershock. He realized he had never shared a kiss before. He still really hadn’t. The other compulsion that clawed at his mind still prowled around his consciousness, but this- a kiss. An intimacy. This is what he wanted from her just as much now. Maybe more. The drive to complete their ritual called for it just as much as the rest of his body called for hers. He knew what it felt like to indulge his body, but that was utility, and while this may still be lust it was also unequivocal need.

_How do I fix it. What have I done wrong?_

“Probably a lot.”

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: “Oh Death”, by Noah Gundersen

Also officially adding **slow burn** tag at 7 chapters without any hanky panky. Just...it'll happen. Patience. 


	8. Endless Winter

  


She didn't like the fact that he had made it so easy. Even if she had wanted to leaving would have hardly felt like a victory in whatever this game was becoming. Not when she could turn around, and walk away. When he wouldn’t ask her to stay even though she knew he wanted her. That she wanted to stay. When she hadn’t stopped him to tell him so before he hastened away.

She had pushed him pretty hard. Asking him to make the choice. Heaving her doubt onto him however justified. Part of her had thought he might find a way to defer to her when she had given him the freedom to choose, but ultimately he had surprised her. Made his proclamation. 

_Rule with me_ it boomed. _Lay with me_ it whispered.

The later throbbed through her. A heat that coiled into her. She brought a hand up to her heart without even thinking. As if her body was calling out to her brain to understand. A pounding heart. A clammy palm. _You want this._

She did. She had. Stopping him just when he had been close enough to reach out and taste. It ripped through the hectic yearning. It was so severe. The dearth of fulfillment. 

In their visions they _were_ emotion. It was easy to be seduced by the reduction. When pure feelings echoed endlessly. When it was raised against the friction of the other’s sublime communion. Here, at first, it was all ironically more real. He felt like anything else. A man. Her mind could not approach him. She could only read his face, his body, and his actions. None of which he used to easily betray his feelings. 

Yet still she was finding herself watching him. Staring quietly. Holding her breath to see if she could hear a hidden sound in the quiet. She had teased and touched. He had helped her embolden herself against the anxiety that buzzed from the lack of feedback. How she missed it. She had taken comfort in _him_. He made her feel some strange sense of anchoring. The man whose face she had sliced open. The first person she had ever thought of killing. His presence, sharing this with him, made it easier. 

Even after he had passed through the gates of horn and tusk. When the gem reforged the bridge of their connection. She hadn't been sure of herself. Not entirely. Even more so, in truth, now that she could feel him again. Knew that he had felt her. Could take in all of this. She was so hesitant to let go of the hurt she should feel. The anger, and disgust. The feelings that only arose because she had realized she was lacking them now in the first place. 

He had sensed the returning bindings that the connection offered, and her mind was buffeted with his wonderment at what she was feeling. It was like the first time she had stood in the rain. She focused on the feeling and let it wash him in her absolution. It was at once quenching and desperately thirsty. It was with that feeling he had turned his face to her. Her mind was plunged back into the sea of their shared want. Nerves danced over her as if a school of fish had swam past her fleeing in a frenzy to escape the shadow that grew ever larger in the murky depths. 

Then, there it had been The feeling she had turned to snarl at him when his mind formed the picture of claiming a prey he had stalked across realities. How his thoughts had been alight with the sight of her bare throat. It had given her the single sober second to shatter a moment she still desperately wanted despite his predatory posturing.

She had thought she learned what she needed when he had made the choice to carry her through the threshold. Knew what he desired. The impulse he was following. Now that the connection whispered to her again the complete image came into focus. Oh, they both wanted something. So much the same. An impatient physicality. Yes, so hot, it left their barriers incinerated in its path. 

Then there was this artifact. Some sense of ownership, a possessiveness that didn't settle well. The lord of the underworld wished to have spring all to himself. Yet she belonged to no one. She would not. She wanted him, and certainly there was a greed in that feeling, but she wanted them to fall into that pleasure together. To share it. So that the consequences, good and bad, belonged to them both. 

She had let him decide for himself what he wanted. On his terms. She could feel it wasn’t something he had much experience in. To let him choose was to understand him, and she desperately needed that. To understand the thing that lived within the dark creature who cast hungry shadows. 

His choice had flowed so easily. It carried him into something irrevocable. As if his natural instinct was to bind himself to her wholly, because to him that was the language of devotion. The liturgy of his compulsion. 

When he had asked her if she was sure it had brightened her, but then she had heard his mind. Preening, yet trapped in a cycle of all of his hurt. The pain that told him not to let go. The pain that said it wasn’t real. That he wasn’t supposed to be happy. The decision he had made reflected something new in the light of it. Something that blistered under it. It was Kylo Ren, but the catalyst was Hades. He could take whatever he wanted. A hubris Ren only pretended at. It left the true uncertainty he was steeped in raw and exposed while Hades feigned triumph in her passiveness. This is where she had turned on him. 

Her request offered her the final truth she needed. She knew he would hate it. Had she thought him lost to this rapaciousness it wouldn’t have even crossed her lips. His ire was worth wanting the answer. His posturing was strong, but it was false. The fact that her mind had almost cast off the hesitation to ignore his dark predilection told her that there was something beyond it. She just needed to know how far the vow he had made extended. If the veneer of predation ran deeper. If he could set aside himself. Even if what she represented to him was the wholeness he had done so many desperate things to find.

She needed him to understand that she supported his choice. In fact, she had encouraged it. He deserved to know that she trusted his resolution. This did not mean she had yielded to his whims. That if anything he could not possess her so much as become part of her. Like their minds already had. Like their bodies craved. Yet an intimacy even beyond that. This is what it meant to her to fall this far into each other. That they would reap the harvest of it together.

She realized that this yearning came from a strange place. A protectiveness. If she had given in to what she had wanted, and how he had wanted, it would have validated the loneliness of it in him. She had seen enough of the dark places that crawled beneath him to know that guilt and burden were like a duty that beat inside him. A second heart. He carried all his choices close to it. He let them run through his veins to wreak all their havoc. 

If she had let him kiss her, it would have turned to a greedy ugly want to fulfill his misguided desire for completion. He would have held her jealously. Would never stopped to feel her return his want, to enjoy that, as he stumbled toward the end of a feeling. Groping hopeless in the idea that any one thing can complete you. The carnality of it would be intense to be sure, a different fit of passion, but it would always destroy them. A storm, the instability that raged inside him, would feed off of it and grow until it washed away everything. 

No. She would protect herself from it. It wouldn’t consume them, at least not practically. She would own her need. She would carry herself into it. How it felt to think of him. How it felt like a panic she was tired of running away from in her mind. Shed remember how unfair she thought it was. How childish that was. 

Powerlessness was not her. That is how she had felt against it. To stop it. How it had tucked itself away in her feelings before she had time to realize it. How she was helpless to stop the part of her mind that had become where he always was. To stop how her body reacted to him. But those thoughts didn’t belong anymore. Of weakness.Of the unfairness. She was ready to own them like she had worried he wanted to own her.

In this they could claim each other.

She thought that he was childish too. Storming away. Yet how that had been how he claimed himself. He had given her what she needed. He wanted her to _choose_ him. The angry trembling feelings of his hunt had been his fear, and the darkness that told him that there was no love only taking. How his dependence on temper had given her honesty with anger. She felt so much in him when she had asked if she was free. A stark failure. The cinders of dejection and self hatred. For him just truth. Crude simple feelings unencumbered by ulterior motive.

_Idiot._

She seethed for just a moment. It didn't stick. Her thoughts were quick to soften in light of the conclusion his ultimate actions had provided. The lack of his understanding in her intent. Even if the path to her answer had been fraught with the perils of his disposition. Now she had it. Now she knew. The way the dark feelings boiled under his skin, always, with nagging hunger. How he had been chipped away and redefined. He thought refined. 

The truth was rough and razor sharp from all angles but from where pain had already dulled its edges. The deep edges where she had slipped through. Running her mind over the pillowy silver that smoldered underneath. Which she had once feared in her ignorance. Which he had hidden. Now she coveted. 

Now she understood. At least, on some level, what glinted in the darkness of him. She’d thrown back the wolve’s clothing to show her a more brilliant beast. Something clever but also scared. What a cruel and graceless age had done with him. How she wasn’t unsure of the undoing. Or his undoing. Oh, but to be sure, she knew of hers. 

She wondered to what lair he had turned to to nurture his solitude. To ease the creature that wanted blood. Had wanted it cruelly. Still wanted it in passion. Now, which would he choose to bring back to her? No matter, because whatever rapture he could offer would still be merciless. 

She had let go of pretense upon her exoneration of him. When they had almost kissed, she had nearly let go of the him that didn’t exist right there. She let her mind have this person who was adulation. Whose eyes were veneration. Whose hands were supplication on her body. She didn’t want to take back the him she saw before that.

_Is it really ok to be selfish?_

Her head swam a bit. She took short small breaths to ease herself away from her rising emotions over their contention. How so few words carried so much context for them with the bond. She reflexively looked up, but there was only the empty dark sky. It left her more faint. So instead she sat on the ground, and tried to focus on what came next.

The last lingering mystery to which neither of them possessed the solution. For all his boasting it was evident to her that his claim of knowing was another mask. A confidence he wore in some misguided attempt to shield her from the frenzy of not knowing. Of being just as lost as he was pretending not to be. Its how he maintained control over himself when nothing around him could be controlled. The swirling logic of it made his eruptive outburst when the illusion slipped seem, not justifiable, but at least understandable. 

The towing strain of this experience was palpable. Like most things now, she knew he shared the feeling. Much like it’s own type of connection the faintly discernable will of this trial pulled on them. Like this place was the very distilled essence of what their connection was. A fairytale world that, upon some realization, would dissipate neatly after the moral of the story was revealed. While their feelings certainly told them some things she still wasn’t exactly sure what it wanted them to learn. To know. To achieve. It wasn’t a game though. It was a lesson, and it was determined to teach them something before it inevitably cast them out.

She felt a prang in her mind at the thought of it ending. The strange variety of simplicity it offered in its isolation from all the complicated subtext of who they were to everyone but themselves. There was this feeling though. A strain. This place could stretch out as long as it needed to survive. It fought for itself. The it that was them. 

_Them._

Maybe, that was it. Them. If they understood each other. If their desires didn't spike so easily between desire and destruction. Then it could thrive. Somewhere beyond their incessant conflict. Find a balance.

Then what? Would it send them back into the life that reached out to them through the veil. That still rested in their minds. Would they fly across the endless night to find each other's arms? Could they return to a world that wouldn't even stop to judge all their sins before their condemnation? For all she knew this place was just a little extra time. The darkness in between when her eyes last opened, and when they will return to seeing one last time. When she looks into the sky over the ocean before death becomes something real, and he was never really there. That this fulfillment was a gift.

She clutched the gem, nested in the black cloth, which rippled a lullaby in her senses when she focused on it. She sat it over her heart. Her body supplicated with a violent curve. From her sitting place, where ferns and white poppies pushed through the gloom to her, her body folded in on itself like her fingers into the folds of the cloth in her hand. Groping for the stone. Her free hand pulled at the soil and there was a pit below her fingers. She wished her blood was thin, because her heart felt heavy. A slow hard pulse in all her limbs. 

Now she begged for better days. She felt the little stone. It was warm with the heat of her palm. The heat of the psalms in her heart. Just hold on. He had cried for her. Thumb and forefinger pinched over it in a prayer that carried the gem up to the light. Following it with her body she stared into its face. Sitting up. Blinking into glittering red refractions that mottled over her. Like it wasn’t content to stay within itself. Like their thoughts poured from them into one another. 

There was an impulse that slid into her. She let it. Bringing the stone to her lips, she kissed it. Imbued it with all these invocations of the demands that ached. She felt his lips there. It cauterized the hideous secrets they whispered. So they could just be scars, and you can build a story with a scar. Build a life. With the promises lips make.

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: “Endless Winter”, by Our Brothers The Natives


	9. The Flaws of a Golden Age

  


He’d always comfortably built fortresses around flaws. Kylo Ren buried them deep in the foundations under the barricades. Every brick a gravestone set in the walls that faced the world. To memorialize his ability to leave so much behind in order to build what he had. Who he was. 

She made him pick at the mortar. Her thoughts. The way she looked inside the cracks. Through the windows. At him. The way that doors weren’t locked for her. How she moved through him. How she let the light in. It made him claw at the stone.

He wasn't sure why. Was he tearing it down to hide the evidence? Before she could see. Before she could look to closely. Or was he laying it bare? 

_Find me! I’m buried here inside. I’m underneath. I’m within. Dig me up. Dust me off. Sink your hands into the soil and tend this garden. Tell me I haven’t salted the earth. Show me how to reap something from the soil where only death is planted. My old sins that decay in the earth. Show me what seeds you’ve sowed. Make me alive again._

If he wanted to build something with her they'd both have to be willing to get their hands dirty. To lay low the blocks that built the walls. Create roads. The past couldn't keep him inside. It would lead the way forward now. He’d throw it all open and tear it all down. Give her the ugly dark places. He would show her that not every shadow was a mistake. That building it all in the perfect sequence had been bitter. Taking it back was bitter. 

Brick by brick. He’d built something as he grew. He moved through instinct. Through guided whispers, and under the shadows of greater things. Greater people. He built himself in the shape of their outlines. Traced his fingers over the way they changed the landscape of his life until he could fit inside. Grow to fill the space. To one day rise high enough to see the light himself. To shove those people into the borders of what he defined as he stepped out in front of them. To build a new world in the sun, and cast a shadow no one could reach beyond. 

Then her. This new feeling. Taking apart. Asking why. She made him stop. To ask that question until it couldn’t find a deeper place. Why was he here. Why was it her? Finding out. When you've pulled it all down to the barest bits. That why is vicious. That why is ugly and raw. Why is painful. Honest. Brutally. That why is freeing. New. Beautiful. 

Thats where he found himself stuck. Somewhere new. Somewhere old. Stalking the halls of his palace. The world Hades had made that rested atop the eternity he had given himself. To always be dead. To bury his body in the world as he built his empire. To become the edifice that was finality. A realm at the end. He had worked to build something undeniable. So he didn’t have to be him. Just the idea of him. An aspect. How he knew even if it was lonely and hidden it was his. Him. That no light could touch it, and no darkness could consume it. He had made this kingdom. Beyond his family. That stood above his predecessors. It was what he had wanted, and it was empty. 

Now he settled into the throne.

Resplendent. Like all good thrones it needled him. Forced him to sit uncomfortably in contemplation. In its gleaming room. He was molded into the confident posture of a leader. It carried the contours of all things that he surrounded himself with. That made him feel right. Strong, and sharp. It reflected and absorbed. An intimidating visage that from the viewer only took. Drinking in the light and soaking up the warmth. Reflecting the enormity of the relentless edges. It wore a disguise of structure but its true beauty was unrefined and chaotic. 

He rubbed his fingers over his jawline. Once again over the scar. Like an anchor. How he had hidden his feeling on it from her. From himself. How it felt foolish now that it represented little more than more questions for him. Was it a flaw? Was it a gift?

He rarely looked at himself, but this place forced his hand. All mirrors. No masks. Just his face looking back at him from everything. How the scar had healed. How it had not. He ran his fingers along it. Dragging them up and over his nose. Until his palm covered it and he saw only the parts of him that had been before she had been. He dragged his palm over it. As if he was wiping it away. To see if something else was underneath.

It was not what he wanted. A new face. One he had not shown to her. So she could see him again for the first time. He had this face. Not a creature beneath a mask, but a monster. She saw through him when she shared his mind. The true thing underneath. Darker. More teeth. It wasn’t what he wanted. A new face would betray the battles he had fought to be here. To be the man he was right now. That she had made him want to look at. To stare down into his reflection. Of this face. His. To face himself.

Now he looked at the man who could have trapped her inside. Shoved her into the dark. He could have given her hunger. A place to sharpen her claws. Filled in his empty spaces with her. To fulfill him. He would have called it noble. His noble selfishness. That she could make it all right. Like he had done time and time before. Take to make himself whole. He could be what she wanted, but only after he possessed her. That somehow he’d be what she wanted if he had her. He could only love what he thought he couldn't lose. Himself. Him having her. Why else would you have power, but to keep what was yours? To make what was yours. As if it had ever been true before. As if, in all his taking, he had ever felt anything but gnawing gaping yawning doubt.

He looked at it all. Took himself in. How in so many ways that place he had built stood unchanged. Nothing moves, and the past stays the same. Some lost and golden age. At least remembered that way. The frozen time that beat the iron into his heart. How his body had carried it away. To here. Where he took a long long look somewhere far away. He couldn't go back, and he didn't want to anyway. 

Now the scar felt right. Under his fingers it was a softer violence. The ritual of enemies. He wasn’t hunting. He never was. The bond was an opening. They used it to inflict their will on each other. He had thought he should do as he had always done. Go for the throat. But she was her own beast. No prey. The wounds they laid open bled, and it had fed their frenzy. Teeth bared in the first firelight. They were searching for an opportunity. Wanting their pound of flesh. He had hoped to devour her. To win. To take. The power to make her his. But that was an end. He wasn't chasing an end. He wasn't hunting. They were circling each other. The dance of lovers. 

A different kind of predation. This is what drew him closer. She would never be his. He would never be hers. Submission didn’t have to be defeat. They could fall on each other’s sabers. Blood on both of their hands. Bodies finally close as the blades sink in. A softer violence.

Then the question returned. A bit different this time. 

_What will I have to do to make it right?_

“Probably a lot,” the reply sat in the air for a moment before a dismissive inflection delivered an addendum, “forgive me, my Lord.”

Kylo Ren was too exhausted to feel the offence that the stranger’s tone should have brought. Still, the intrusion had left him feeling abrasive. Especially considering the interloper had answered a thought. He looked down at the man. Sandy robes, and confident posture. Even so the man’s mannerisms were unusually worn down. Like someone many times the age they appeared. It was all familiar, and that rolled over a faint and distant part of his mind.

“Your Grace, welcome home. Forgive me again for interrupting your thoughts. It’s just that I wished to ask if you would have me make any special preparations for the celebration?” 

A smirk twitched over the stranger’s face nearly hidden by his beard, but easily readable in his eyes. 

“What are you talking about?”

He wasn’t in the mood for the games of someone who occupied this place. How it was even possible that there were others here. He tried not to focus on it. How he couldn’t feel this man. Like this vassal was hiding himself. 

“The young lady, your majesty. I understand there is reason to celebrate the circumstances through which your guest has arrived.” The man flicked up birdlike wings in something resembling a shrug. “Though, if you don’t mind my saying, it seems unusual to leave her at the gate to find her own way in. Still, I imagine she won't keep us waiting much longer at her current pace.”

The man was lecturing him through eyelids which hung heavy as if the very conversation with Hades left him exhausted. Then it came to him. The dreamer. Hypnos. What this man was here. Then the other feelings. There was certainly something beyond that. A presence beyond this place. How could he be here if not through some connection to them. He wanted to find it. The other part of the puzzle. His other name. 

“She is on her way here?”

“That seems to be her intent, yes.” 

Kylo Ren thought of Hades. Ruminating on how he should handle the news. “Send someone to greet her when she arrives.” 

“Will you not be going yourself,” Hypnos pressed his lips to conceal a mocking smile, “to bring her here that is?”

“I’m done spiriting her away. Let her carry herself here. She’s more than capable.”

His eyes slid shut. Some strange anxiety flooded inside him, and it left him heavy.

“I will send an attendant to prepare a suite for her then, your highness. Shall I have her brought before you when she arrives?”

“No!” It snapped out of him. “Have her brought to her quarters, or if she would prefer the baths, to rest. Do not bring her here until she asks directly to see me.”

He cracked his eyelids open just enough to see Hypnos still stood before him waiting to be dismissed with a satisfied look resting over his expression. He certainly had no problem finding his way in without permission. Kylo Ren shot him a disapproving look. 

“If that is all then?” 

The man gave the barest courtesy as he bent at the waist and then turned to leave.

Hades felt his weight. A sleepy haze around him in his throne. No doubt he had spent too long with his servant who usually slept beneath the stones. As he drifted off he noticed the dark outline that Hypnos greeted like a brother, open arms, in the entryway. This one in black robes. A shadow that sent something shrieking into him. Thanatos. 

He desperately wanted to call out to them. To know more. How they were here? Why? Yet, he couldn’t fight this sleep. He caught their conversation as they drifted away. As his consciousness drifted away.

“Well, that went well. I hardly needed to encourage him at all,” Hypnos quipped.

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll find some way to be stubborn.” 

The voice carried a deathly chill, but it conforted Ren. It was heavy with something he missed. Even if he didn’t understand why. 

“I have no doubt.” The voice of Hypnos washed a sigh over him before he fell into a strange sleep.

 

__________

 

It had taken her quite a while to find the right footing. The right words that would ferry her across her path. Now Rey stood at the bottom of his steps. She had thought she might feel flighty when she finally saw it. Indeed, the urge to run did glide through her limbs. It just rushed forward, upward, instead of away. 

There was a thrill in her. _I made it! I’m finally here!_ It left her a bit wounded that he hadn’t come to meet her. She'd done her fair share to reach halfway. Surely by now, as she waited on his doorstep, he had come to realize that she never intended to leave. It would have been simple to just leave. Instead she had taken the difficult road. To reach him. 

There was someone there now though. A woman, tall and slender, who was adorned beautifully. Just looking at her soothed something inside her. The pale woman, with her pale hair was stark against all the angular dark stone. She was out of place in more ways than that. If she looked at her too long it was as if she shimmered. A hallucination on a distant horizon. As if a veil covered her. From sight and from mind. Rey feared that if she looked away she might forget that she had ever seen her.

“Greetings, my Lady. I am Pasithea, and I welcome you to the palace of his highness, Lord of the Underworld, Hades.” The woman introduced herself elaborately gliding down the stairs.

Rey reached out to her as she came near. Wanting to see if she was truly there. Pasithea made no attempt to stay her hand, and as she touched the ornamental flowers that adorned her headpiece they bloomed to life. She sensed that she had smiled at this despite the fact that Rey couldn’t quite hold the way the woman’s face looked in her mind moments after. 

As she strained to work her way into the illusion she felt a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Welcome home. Should you have it.” The quality of her voice prickled over Rey's skin like a pleasing cool breeze. Pasithea soothed a stray hair back into place in Rey’s drooping updo. “Please, let me know if there is anything you desire. Until then, it would be my pleasure to show you to your suite to rest. Or if you prefer, the baths.” 

The baths. That sounded like something delightful. The swirling feelings that Pasithea passed over her settled gently into the idea. 

“Baths? That sounds nice.”

So she followed with an easy pace as her guide showed the way. She felt so calm. Like resting white petals on dark shoulders. She was content to flow along behind the glossy vision of her attendant down the splendid halls.

Pasithea. A graceful creature. Her name felt strange in Rey’s head. Like Persephone. It belonged to somewhere else. New secrets. 

Now as they made their way forward, even in the trance, she found herself having a hard time believing everything she saw as she passed through the halls. It made her fall outside the role she knew she should play. Stepping back into the scavenger instead. Remembering empty hunger as she inventoried countless object of wealth. More than she had seen over all of her life. Vessels of splendid metal covered in gems, with the artistry of a hand that no mortal could ever match, just the right size to carry away in her arms. They were bathed in enough abundance to provide multiple lifetimes of rations could she find a willing buyer. 

Even if she no longer felt hunger. Or needed for food. She couldn’t stop the greedy thought. Over a greedy wealth. A greedy desire to feed a need she no longer had. An odd habit crowned with lonely memories. 

She let the thought fall away as much as she could. She channeled Persephone. What she would think of this. What it would mean for her. That now it meant the same for Rey.

“Does it all belong to him?”

“To you as well. Soon.”

“You keep saying that. How do you mean?”

The woman’s aura radiated a little laugh. A gentle teasing that played around the edges of Rey and made her feel a bit naive.

“I’m sure you have some sense already to what it is. It started when he carried you here. Is it not stronger now that you are close?”

Rey understood. It was all very exposing. The bond, in her world, it belonged to her. To him. They could hide it, or share it, as they liked. In the end, however, it was just theirs. It took nothing away from it to just belong to each other. It was warm, familiar, and informal. Intimate.

Here they held no secrets. What they were. What they chose to be to each other. It belonged to everyone, because of how it rippled through the framework of this reality. The proclamation of their choses gave them weight. Sealed them in. Officiated rituals. Every move they made was part of completing it. Each had to be laid out. Examined and found sound. In turn the ritual was a sort of game. They had played it from the beginning, and their choices became the story. The outcome wasn’t to win or to lose, but to find out how it would all unfold when their flaws were counted. When their souls were weighed against their sins. What balance would they strike.

That's why she carried a weight in her words. In her deeds. His too. Why every move they made was a spell, and it weaved magic into the world. How she could still grow so far from the sun. So far from everything alive. How they changed everything. How she wanted to change everything.

“You’re right. I guess it's just hard to take in. The intensity of it just makes the last steps feel overwhelming. It's hard to walk into a sandstorm without blinking.”

“You’ve already left plenty of hard steps behind you at least. Remember, following what you want doesn't make the path any clearer. You'll always suffer for it. You can’t shield yourself from the burden of choice. Not unless you refuse to continue. To deny yourself an ending, and languish in whatever solace solitude offers.” 

“Loneliness is its own grief. So, is all choice to suffer?”

They turned the corner into the baths. Pausing, Pasithea sent a dulcid wave through Rey, pale fingers wrapped around her wrist bracingly. The gesture felt protective. Sturdy, and comforting. It conveyed a distant sorrow that the wispy woman tucked away. Pity, and regret. 

“One way or another. I'd rather suffer for happiness.”

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: A combination of the song titles “Flaws”, by Bastille, and “Little Golden Age”, by Wolf Parade. 


	10. Fear of the unknown and The Blazing Sun

  


**Warning:** sexual content for this story begins in earnest here. Explicit content will follow in later chapters so last warning.

\--------- 

It was something new. Something welcome. Persephone turned to thank Pasithea for bringing her to this place. It was just what some distant human ache in her limbs called for.

“You have but to say my name and I will return should you need anything.”

Then the woman was gone. Leaving her to herself. 

She shivered despite the warm steam that wound idly through the space. Her bare feet against cold dark stone that reached out to frame the long narrow pool opulently. This wasn’t a room. It was a cavern dressed in the idea of a room. 

The roof of it was low and encrusted with a layer of minerals like sugar that twinkled with each caress of light. The bath itself looked as if it had once been a natural structure, but was now made to sit in the straight lines of its polished stone borders. Directly above it a mirrored metal panel served to reflect the water which continuously rolled into the pool. 

The source of the water remained the same. A natural structure along the back of the space. It felt out of time. Like the walls had been crying their crystal clear tears into the quiet pool for ages. Scarring its cheeks until their face rippled like smooth curtains of stone. 

Rey felt almost as if she was intruding. Caught in her moment of the drama of eons. Steam grew thick against the ceiling until it boiled over. Plummeting below. Echoing its wet notes against the heavy silence. From the ceiling and the floor great stones reached over unseen ages toward each other one drop at a time. 

Sumptuously wrought censers breathed perfume like languid golden dreamers. Dancing wisps of something deep. Cypress and opium blossoms, moss and myrrh, violet orris. She sighed through a breath of it, sounding across the space, a purring calm. A stray tear from above dropped on the hot metal eliciting heavy smoke and a sibilant protest that sounded as if the room itself was hushing her. 

To separate the sanctuary of this space against the gaping darkness, which surely tunneled for miles beyond, two monolithic stones were laid on their edges. They ran the length of the pool from the spring to the entryway. Forming the room within the earth. The frame around them was the darkness beyond where they skirted the natural walls. A boundary between the manmade and the divine. 

The hulking blocks were adorned as most things here. She had finally taken to wandering the space, and found her fingers dragging over the scene illuminated with bats. They swept away sleep to plunge into the pastel evening fog against the sky, and the fading hues of a setting sun. All puzzled together in delicate shining agate held in webs of gold. Her fingers dragged wakes of precipitation over their slick humidity. Tracing lines over the patterns of their wings until she reached the spring.

The way it rolled over the stone was beautiful. Transfixing as It caught the light just so. Lensing the grains that built the sculpture of it into high detail. She laid her palm over it half expecting a heartbeat. The water pooled in the crooks of her fingers. Forced to find new paths in its endless journey. The thing that she found most fascinating about it though was the temperature. Cool.

She thought she shouldn’t be surprised. A cave would have cool water, and yet everything was so warm around her it didn't make sense. She edged to the pool itself. Placid. Tufts of steam played over the surface as she dipped in a curious toe. It was a bright heat. Like sinking your hands into the sun soaked sand. It was a spell which felt like a magic _he_ made. She wanted to just fall into it.

One foot after another she did. Gown and all. Parting the water with her shins as the white silk soaked through. It clung around her as the petals that once fell over it freed themselves and floated to the surface. The further she sank in the more the water became a garden. The petals coalescing back into white blossoms on the surface which swirled around her as she explored the pleasing warmth.

She stood for a moment in the center of the depth. Happy to find it was shallow enough to stand. Swimming wasn’t a skill she was confident in. Floating though. She could manage that.

She dipped herself under the surface for just a second. Baptised in the heat. Then a breath, and she closed her eyes. Let herself settle into the arms of the water cradling her shoulders as she pushed her feet off the bottom. 

When she steadied herself her eyes opened to find her reflection laying in the the space above her. Persephone of spring. Draped in a filmy white that billowed around her. A phantom that cherished her form in it’s embrace. In a way that she never had. She knew strong, lean, and reliable Rey. What was the use of being something beautiful.

She couldn’t stop it. The girl that she had rarely seen was intriguing. Dewey eyes blinking back at her. She was comely. Long and lovely. She felt alluring. Delicate. Something beyond the acceptable. Far away from the satisfactory self assessment she made when her reflection caught her in the shiny bits of straship corpses, or the roiling water of the troughs. 

This place entwined its enchantments into her as much as her magic knotted through it. It allowed her a new feeling for a discarded vanity. Over this thing. A body whose limbs had carried her away from the straightforward fate of her waiting. That nagging voice that still fell into her mind. It sang with open arms, a rhythmic predictability, about its orderly self reliant pace. About a patient quantifiable loneliness. A past she didn’t crave any longer. She was growing into the chaos, and it suited her. Like her body suited her. A form which she was beginning to see congruent with the growing desire that had found its home inside her. 

She took a hand out of the water and smoothed the fabric that cleaved to her chest. The folds of cloth rippled over her soothing. Fingers of white pawing over her frame where it did not stick. Where it hid little. She rolled her own long fingers down her sides. Over the notches of her ribs. The clinging parts of her trappings created loops of feedback in her senses. She squirmed at their touch. A writhing which only made the feeling more insistent. 

It felt fast. Everything inside her was running. 

She pushed her feet to the bottom of the pool. Standing in the stirring awareness. She looked for something around her. Something to answer the need. Her mind turned just once. Like a planet below her. She thought of him.

  


____

  


His sleep was a void.

It was until it wasn’t. 

It had felt that abrupt. When she became a dream. Warm. Steamy. Wet. A dream of a dream. A vision of her. Breathing long sighs. The image flowed and melted. Floated inside him. Through him. His mind traced the ghost of her. Somehow visceral. Even when his attempts to reach out were like grabbing water.

Her eyes.

They were controll. He was surprised at how happily helpless he was against it. She showed him her lips, and her neck. A slender throat. A narrow view, but consuming. It felt like a window into something that wasn’t his. He was to be gracious he could see at all. So she showed him.

Fingers grazing lazily over her. She showed him that he could only watch. He begged to watch. To follow the hand as it fell to her neck. As it fell down. Down. He was denied. 

Straining to see through the tiny window he was allowed. His dream was its own creature. It ate him alive, and he was grateful. 

He watched as she sucked in a sharp breath over clenched teeth. Her lips parted weakly. Tense clavicles created tiny recesses where water pooled at her neck as she leaned into the flow. As it seeped slowly over shoulders whose blades pushed against the weeping wall. Drops of it beading in the dry places. Dripping heavy trails over her, which his eyes followed. Which his fingers begged to follow. Like his whole mind begged to see what her hand had done to give her such a secret smile as she wore now.

He could almost see the tease more. The defiant window framing her jaw clenching. As her body rolled under what he couldn’t see. Moving this and that across his tiny pane. Tantalizing close. Edging into him. He closed his eyes at the transcendent frustration.

Now he heard her. For a moment. The sounds of her. Throaty choked huffing. Erratic exhales. His eyes shot open to silence. Her shoulders more relaxed he could see that her arm hung looser, and he sensed her hands moving. Eyes closed.

He felt a stroke of fingers over his ribs as if she reached from somewhere behind him. To run her fingers over the ridges of lean muscle that stretched over them and weaved into his abdomen. The gentle way they threaded down. Fingers splayed over his core. He flexed impulsively under the foreign touch. The phantom of her explorations. 

She had paused at his stiffening. His flighty nerves betraying him. The feeling of her withdrew. He opened his eyes for a flash of her hand over her own navel. Fingers pushing into herself as she hesitated. 

He saw her lips again. Pressed into each other. He could see her shoulders as they drew up toward her ears while her hands continued down from where they had left off on him. Where they had gotten so close to the part of him that wanted most. The place on herself that so desperately called out to her touch the same.

He drank in what he could see. Yearning for more. The way she moved under her own hand. The subtle quiver of the corners of her mouth. The way the muscles in her neck danced over breaths and rolled into moans. She showed him enough. Just enough to know enough wasn't enough. 

Oh, he took what he could get to be certain. Every last inch. Running with it in his mind. The bracing gasps. The shrugging of her shoulders wracked with involuntary spasms. How her tongue rolled out over her bottom lip. How her teeth would drag it under. The lashes that fluttered above restless eyes caught in their own dream. It belonged to his greedy mind. 

A mirage of language rattled over her tongue. Verbose layers. Pulling him soundlessly through the veil. It was a chorus building. Reaching out from the other side. Heartbeats in the stillness. Hissing his own voice into the tremble. He hadn't felt the moment decompress as it crushed around him.

Head rolls back. Eyes slammed shut. _Brace yourself_. The aftershock.

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: “Fear of the unknown and The Blazing Sun”, by Colin Stetson


	11. Many Jewels Surround the Crown

  


Rey trembled. The seismic aftermath of her exploration, an entirely visceral thrumming, sparked over her legs. The embers of it tumbled over her awareness and across the bond where she felt them dissolve over his hazy sleep. She sunk back into the water unable to do anything else. 

Her thoughts were unusually serene. The kind of lackadaisical space she rarely had the time to linger in. She let it all settle over her as she stared at nothing in particular.The water felt as if it had begun to cool a bit, and she was grateful. Every surface of her felt flushed, and spent. 

She did smile a bit to think that he too must be laid out. She felt him the same way he felt her. The same way all his senses pleaded to actually feel her when she let him in. She had called out, and his mind had answered. Even if he didn’t know it had been real. His eyes had found her in his dream, and so she gave him a window through which he could watch. She gave him a view she enjoyed feeling him enjoy. So she felt him, and how he finished, in the same way she felt herself.

She had needed it, and he had needed it. A release so they could face each other with any sense. Now she could feel the weight of it lifted just a bit. Just enough so she could breath for a moment, and really think about what it was she wanted.

She wanted to touch him. That is what her mind settled on. To really actually touch him, and not with hands made of smoke in dreams. In dreams of dreams. She had felt what it might be for a moment, but she turned back too soon. Or soon enough. At least in that waiting she could find a happy longing. To feel what skin felt like against fingers, and to feel him being felt. To touch a real person. To press her body into him, and feel more than with her fingertips. 

She was good at waiting. This time wanting wasn’t something that had wandered too far. She knew it wasn't a hopeless thing that would never come. It was the tiny fears that nudged her thoughts that kept her from just pursuing instead of patience.

Then she felt something rising into her consciousness. Full and empty, the edge of his voice, as his mind woke up. He had awoken to realize something she had already known. He reached out to the bond, fumbling in his afterglow, to confirm it. That the dream that they shared was something more. Something real in the way that things were real for them here, or at all, and not yet another new layer of madness. 

Just before he pushed a word through to her he fled. Some distant notion of worry flushed through her mind at his realization. First what he had seen and not imagined. Second at her willingness to invite him to watch. Elation, and shock. Then it was all quiet again. Neither of them sure what to say or how to feel. They had both enjoyed it, and they both wanted more. It wasn’t hard to find that through the static of all their feelings. It was a lot to process now that it was close, and now that it had been acted upon in some way. An opening act. 

The theatre of it was it’s own wound. They carried that close, and it harmed them with what little it offered. They needed to start healing all these traumas. Inflicted on them by their lives, their circumstances, the duties they carried, and the sides they chose. The hurts they wore when it was all they had to define themselves. The anguishes they levied on one another through these choices. They had been doing it alone for such a long long time. It was their turn for warmth. To be full.

This was all easy when confidence was awarded through control. The dangerous roaring of their bright build of energy was safely contained in its cage, and beyond the wall that separated them by distance. A barrier both mental, and most importantly, in this case, physical. Her awkward reality of inexperience, and a gulf of unknowing could be mitigated through the distance. She could want, scraping at the thought of it all she needed, but the reality of touch was still frightening.

She wondered about his true eyes, and how they would look at her. To be open, and to open up to him. With him. How he would see her. That is what consumed her thoughts. The instinct of her body understood, and it knew how to act upon understanding. The logical part of her felt insufficient and overwhelmed. Mortified to face the reality of being unprepared for all the things that came beyond hands on bodies. It felt like she was bracing for some terrible battle, and for once she felt outmatched. She didn’t want that to be what he saw in her. 

The problem was the truth always circled back around. She still wanted these things. She still felt immature for not knowing how to face them. Like she was caught in the idea of his hands, and her hands, and how they would feel. She was trapped in the thought she could make a mistake. Something that could ruin the experience, and the memory of the experience. To make him realize it was all wrong. An error so grievous that they would be torn from this place that was just so perfect. That was just what she needed. That she felt him needing too. 

A place that had made her ready for red cheeks, and held breaths. She wanted to cling to the way it all made her heart race. The place that had made her realize that she could want something for herself, and that desire was fulfilling. That sealing this ritual of want would allow them both to really see the reason they craved in the first place. Not just a handsome face, and a warm winding body, but a man. Jagged and unruly. How what he represents for her changed all the choices she thought she would make. How they built their own world already. Now they needed to find a way to rule it. To own all this want. She needed to find the right path to let go, and finally lose control.

 

______________ 

 

Kylo Ren felt her nearby. His mind was filled with all her chaotic tumult, and its bright glow. It was the same bracing raw feeling that had been pushed through him in his dream. As it retreated his pupils dilated, and he threw his posture stiffly into a hunch. Fingers dug into the arms of his throne as he tried to connect himself back to something solid while his mind turned. He recoiled when his thoughts nearly betrayed him to her. 

It had all been real. She had let him watch her. Her control wasn’t some fantasy his mind had concocted to ease his aching need. It was her letting him in, but only just enough. She had let him watch her come. The feeling that echoed was her feeling him too. His mind nearly fell apart.

He had panicked for a moment that she would come through those doors, and see the mess he had made of himself as he sat on his throne. His mind went into autopilot, and carried him back to his chambers. He stripped himself, and stood for a moment to let his mind catch up with his responses. 

She had shown him her soft breaths as she explored her body. She had reached through his mind to touch him. He traced his own fingers over himself to feel it again. To see if it had been what he had felt. Her fingers had been like running water, and his were rough and real. Hers were a memory of a feeling, and he never realized how much he craved that truth of that touch.

What were her finger like? No longer the scavenger in his mind, but the essence of what made things reach out from the dark and grow. She was what it felt to want to rise up and be alive. Would they feel like daylight on the scarred planes of him? He wanted to mold himself into the contours of her. Breath with the curves of her body. Press his fingers between soft lips, and feel her taste him. Place his head on blessed breast while pawing hands found the curve of his shoulders. Press all of his hard edges into her.

He had always been able to stem the tide of baser instinct himself. He had even fucked. Felt the act of it at it’s most basic and utilitarian. It had been frivolous, and as soon as he had done it he had wanted to do away with it. A distraction he wasn’t willing to give time to, and most definitely not one he was willing to let control him.

She wasn’t that. He wanted to give into the puerility of it, and revel in the fact that it achieved nothing to be with her besides his satisfaction. Simply feeling her want him was a fever that boiled over his senses. They singed at the idea of holding her again. Touch, something that would have felt so cheap before he had seen her that day. To hold her in his arms, and feel fire, despite all the layers of him. He couldn’t stand the idea of not reaching out to her despite the heat. A flame worth the burn. 

She didn’t need to be anything for him to want her. She didn’t need to represent something he had done. A conquered enemy, or a converted ally. A student whose prowess could be a mark of his skills as a master. A force sensitive with enough potential to change the tide of the conflict. Another jewel in the crown of the empire his master was creating, or one in his own when he usurped the position. 

That didn’t matter to him. He wanted her to wear her own crown, surrounded already by many jewels, and stand with him. He wanted her by his side, because she was what turned his weary heart into something that belonged only to him again. He wanted it to beat for the way he felt, and to hold it in his own hand. His choices needed to belong to himself again. Just long enough to remember which things his heart had asked him for and which were made when he had put his heart away. She had given him back the idea of himself, and he strained to remember what that felt like. So when he offered himself to her that it was wholly him, and not the pain that wore him. She didn’t deserve that. Neither did he. 

Now was just the reality of basic want. After he had the spectre of a kiss, and the illusion of an intimacy. The long dusky shadows of a touch, and the aching connection it promised. Something beyond need, and want. Lust, but so much more. 

He stood naked and shaking his mind begging her to ask. Praying _want me!_ He managed to half dress himself as he held his breath. Worried he may miss a faint whisper if he breaks the silence. He reached out with his mind to feel her heartbeat. Worried she may shrink away after feeling her shaking thoughts as she released him from the dream. 

Her confidence in her authority had been moved away by a fearful something he couldn’t find words for. It wasn’t of him, but of something surrounding him. She moved away like he had shrunken from her to collect his thoughts after the deluge of everything that the dream had been. A similar coyness as how she hadn't shown him everything. A tease yes, but without that intent. She had still given him all her feeling, but shied away from leaving herself exposed fully somehow.

He wanted to wrap her into the warmth that had sent a feeling of comfort across him not long ago. To fill her with the gentle rocking sensation of giving in to being carried into the frightening unknown. That this fearful thing that surrounded him in her mind wasn’t part of him, but came from her own fear. That he wanted nothing more than to give her everything she needed to chase away the doubts she had about him. To ease her mind so that she knew what he wanted, and she wanted the same. So when she was willing that he could stop holding back.

“Hades?” her voice trickled into his consciousness.

His heart felt like it was evaporating through the spaces in his ribs, and all his breath with it. He waited. Forever.

“I’m tired of being alone”, her voice came finally as a muted warble full of nerves. 

He couldn’t answer because his mind was vacant. The statement had emptied what was left of him into the sweet death of hearing it from her voice. She had slain him with her intent, and so she reached out to bring him back.

“Come to me”, the words felt like they were falling out, a soft demand followed by a softer begging, “Please?”

He didn't hesitate.

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: “Many Jewels Surround the Crown (Instrumental)”, by Prurient.


	12. If When you Call She Comes

 

 

Persephone had let his name find her lips. She stood up in the water of the pool between the great stones which told the story of a room, and she found herself done with being lonely. So, she had summoned him.

_And there he stood._

Some clinging need to be modest swept through her and she had to force it down before her arms tried to cover a shame she didn’t feel. She tried to remember the confidence the mirrors above had given her so that her eyes didn’t cast themselves down into the water. In a singular betrayal of her fearfulness their reflections danced in the pool with the rippling of her tremble, but she kept her eyes on him. 

_So still, but no dream._

His reflection was not unlike himself, distorted and unrefined, and yet so defined. So definite. The places where her mind had run fingers across him in far away dreams were a few step away. His chest rising and falling sharply as he caught his breath from running here. Barefoot and shirtless.

_Just a breath away._

Somewhere she hoped he’d just take what she wanted taken. To get to it, and to get it over with so she could stop fearing. He could change the unknown into the learned. She wanted a teacher. Then they could keep learning together. She waited hopefully, for him to show her the way.

_Yet, he stood still._

His heaving breaths had now slowed to a steady calm, and they echoed patiently in the space. She had asked him to come with little begging words. Now she was trying not to be meek just standing here. What was he supposed to do but wait? He’d surely grasped her intentions, and her hesitation. Their minds swam back and forth even in this moment when they were so guarded. 

“If you want to leave,” his words came with sharp edges annunciating pointedly, “you can.”

_He stood his ground._

Confidently he held the spot. His stance almost felt as if it was leaning forward ready to sprint. She finally stole into his confidence. Knowing it wasn’t easy for him to find either in such a strange moment. She was free to leave, but made no motion. Her eyes defied his offer, and gave him her attention so he could finish his last thought.

_His eyes bore down on her._

“If you stay”, his voice was completely on the edge of control, and his thought hung there for a moment. He opened and closed his fists, and his eyes kept wanting to look away though he wouldn’t let them. It gave his expression a cornered wildness. “If you stay,” he started again, “I can’t promise I won't take something I want.” 

_The words lit a match._

She stood in the fuel. Soaked in the desire flooding into her through his thoughts, and wanting nothing more than to ignite it. The inferno of him begged to consume her, and she threw herself on the pyre. He had given her the gift of choosing without having to do anything at all. Just stand, and stay. She was done running. “I'm not going anywhere.”

_So, there she stood, staring him down._

He took the the steps into the pool two at a time. His shins sliced through the water with little grace, practically falling forward, as his hands moved out to steady him. She took a step back at his aggressive wading, but he quickly closed the distance with ease.

_He loomed over her._

His hands fell into the water at his side, and he looked down into her. His eyes took in what he had been denied in his dream. All of her. The thoughts he had no longer came through clearly, but as a humming furious sound. It was the same intensity that she saw when she looked over his face, over the scar she had given him, and saw an expression she wanted every part of. A hunger they both needed to feed.

_He stepped toward her._

He leaned in so far that had she not taken another step back they would be chest to chest. She sucked in her breath as she found the wall was close behind her. Still, when she looked at him, her mind called out _chase me!_

_He moved closer._

Another broad step, and she pushed herself to the wall. Her eyes wanted to hold his. To keep calling out _hunt me!_ It wouldn’t stick though, and she ached, but she was afraid. Her shivering became obvious, if it had ever been a secret, and she fled. Even if she wanted she didn’t know how to surrender, because she never had.

_He stepped into her._

She had retreated from him entirely, but there was no where to go. She realized she had even retreated from the bond, but again it reached out. It told her not to be afraid. It asked nicely, and she believed. It stumbled over the thoughts of animal instinct, and amplified the narcotic sonata of their closeness. Finally a real proximity. These things howled at her door, and the song was a comfort. Her wolf. 

_His mind pressed into her. Begged._

Urging into her gently he pressed his chest into her to push her against the wall. Pinning her against his booming heart. Her uncertainty had driven her back, and she could feel the beat of his, the drum which sent him marching forward. The masochist in him called to embrace the discomfort. She couldn't help herself, and she reached up to his face. They both feared and wanted the closeness. She hovered above his jaw.

_She ran fingers along the scar._

A sound crooned over his lips with the satisfaction of her touch. It rolled into her over the buzzing in his chest, and over the borders of their connection. His jaw was tight, but his eyes didn’t dare shut. His gaze never left her face as she studied him with slender fingers, and their precise trails over his features as her own shifted with emotions. 

“I’m sorry.”

She wore the expression of a far away sadness when she said it. He seized her wrist, and brought it above her head against the wall. He shifted in a way that caused her eyes to close as she arched into him just when his chest pulled away. The pressure was replaced with his hips pushing her back, and he leaned close to her. She opened her eyes to a perfect face perched just above her own, and she wanted him. A beautiful hungry animal.

“I’m not.”

The words were gone as he pressed his mouth into hers. Her hand flexed in his grip, and she ground the back of her head into the wall as his lips pursued her. She moved hers under his, and hummed and groaned little sounds over her throat with their rhythm. His free hand came up and touched her cheek, and then ran its way back over her ear and around her head until he held it almost entirely in his palm’s expanse. It cradled her against the hard stone behind her, and he used his grip to guide her deeper into their kiss.

_The Lord of the Underworld was kissing her._

Kylo Ren was kissing her. She liked it very much. She could sense just how right it felt for both of them over the frantic hammering of the bond in her mind, and it’s rising intensity. He withdrew the pressure for a moment as she smiled under his lips. Breaking the contact just enough to bring their eyes into focus for each other. She couldn’t stop it, she was intoxicated, and he smiled too. With happy hungry eyes. 

 

__________

 

_Her eyes were perfect._

They filled him with something he could barely remember. It was a happiness he had relegated to personal myth. Such an immaculate joy that any other was forsaken on the altar of this, because she looked up at him. All her retreating, and fear had become nothing, and she was this moment. Perfect eyes looking at him.

_Eyes that wanted him._

He felt perfect. Her eyes gave him that and so he kissed her again. He pushed into her mouth with a feeling of urgency to fill the earnest deficiency of any real contact before her. They were making up for lost time. He felt her too, a deserted place in her, she was filling up. The two minds that made them were whole worlds floating in the dark which had waited alone in an existence of scarcity. A thousand thousand years without rain. 

_They were thirsty._

Opening his mouth over hers they fell into the stupor of the downpour. He dragged his lips over hers, and his teeth. It was fumbling, and it was clumsy, and it was perfect. She was perfect. Fucking perfect. Tasting like salty rosewater, and soaked to the bone. She threw herself into the thunder of it. It percussed across their bodies in pulses, and her mind pleaded with him in a way that destroyed any whisper of stability that remained in him.

_She pulled yearning fingers over him._

She was the seed of his sainthood, and it grew inside him in the infusion of her life. In this season of rain when the earth stirs. The end of their season, and the beginning of life. He had so little time. So he took it all.

 

__________

 

_Please. Please, please. PLEASE!_

They both begged into the connection. The bond warping around their touch to consume what was left of separation. It was her and him, not them. A kiss was a place which they occupied, and they made it their own. They filled themselves with the touching of it. Soft. Swelling as they learned what teeth could be for. Biting at necks, and biting breaths. 

_Voracious lips._

They took turns exploring. Intrepid tasting. A moan pushed over the air between them as mouths found the tender places of pulses beating over ragged breathing. Then their bodies acted the same pressing hips together like insatiable kisses. With legs tangled like tongues moving in the spaces of their open mouths, desperately trying to find a way between and inside. 

_Famished bodies._

Their limbs were restless, wrestling against the wantonly hurried bodies that crashed together without grace. Their arms worked to find lascivious leverage, an opening to take new turns at touching. Their minds were vacuous with the writhing of bodies against the partition of their physical form. The experience of being apart was painful dissociation, and it left them with only tactility. Pawing spasms nerotically wandering against skin in excited glimpses of sensation.

_Meager hands._

Fingers regarded flesh across the wet from searing surges of want dripping down as sweat on bare chest and fevered forehead. This time fingers followed, and finally fabric was rended. The angry hiss of silk splitting along the splintering weave with fibers frayed like nerves. Their was a slowness as hands came down to illuminate the feeling of curling presses as dresses dissolved. 

_Splitting need_.

They retreated into a moment. Too big hands framing her ribs as they rolled into him, and his mouth worked its way over her sternum. Lips, and tongue, then teeth. One rib at a time as she rose to meet his advance with each heave of her breathing. Until he had a choice and his mouth explored one path then back to go halfway up the other teasing. She rolled her torso into him, and he gripped at her sides catching her gaze before choosing.

_Rising breath._

His lips rolled over the peaks of her chest, then slow deep kisses press in. Working back to the bottom his mouth drags up lazily, running his tongue along to taste his path, flicking harder as his mouth closed around her hard nipple. He sucks in and rolls her around in his mouth, until it almost seems like it might be too much, putting his teeth over it raking lightly. His hand on her other pulling, pinching. Her hand in his hair running nails over his scalp rushing a sparking tingle down his spine.

_So much._

She pushes him away, but not in rejection. In a hurry. He watches her body, nimble resourceful hands pulling at the latches of his pants. She feels the spike of anxious pacing in his thoughts, but he wouldn't dare interfere with her work. As the buttons came open she paused at each, with eyes full of taunting light. She brushed her palms over the hardness that pushed inside to revel in his keening sounds as she moved. How his hips rose to meet her as she slid a hand inside before the last button freed him. His head rolled back and he groaned. 

_So fast._

He already felt the dangerous pressure. She trembled at his feeling. He pushed her away, and found the last button, peeling away the restriction, and tossing it aside. She took him in for just a moment, as he had done to her, enjoying how powerful his body was. How it frightened her in the best way. How looking at him made her shiver, and flush with warmth. He closed their distance once again taking her head in both hands as he pushed himself close and pressed his mouth into her again. She clawed at his shoulder encouraging his frenzy.

_Hold on._

She was surprised as he started to lift her, grabbing her waist and pulling her body up the slick wall of the spring until she was high enough to break their kiss. He leaned in for support as he kissed down her body. Getting her as high as he could he stooped to lean into her thighs and part them. His shoulders tucking under her as he stood his full height, she rode on top of them as he pushed her into the wall. His face buried in the gap as he sucked and nipped at her inner thighs and she squirmed to see him looking at her from this vantage. There were sharp greedy feelings.

_Get ready._

He worked his mouth to the center and wasted no time finding every place that set the stars on fire in her vision. The warmth of his breath taunted her as he reached out with his agile tongue for a few running tastes before it settled into circles cycling upward. His grip tightened while her arms grasped at the wall behind her, and he felt fulfilled above her rolling hips. He grew painfully harder with her taste, and how she was wet for him. As her legs twitched they both fell into rhythmic patterns, his tongue flickering around her clit, his mouth closing to suck it in every so often.

_So close._

A pressure rises. It feels like falling when the adrenaline rolls over the fluttering parts of your insides. Everything rises up weightless for such a small moment that lingers so long. He took his hardness in hand and stroked himself in sync with the spasms of her ticking. She felt nothing but him tasting her, mind and body. Everything fought despite the demand of an inevitable conclusion, but nothing comes easy. 

_Almost!_

They strained against the build, and the pressure that railed against their minds. Just a held breath and a final push from escape. Their bodies clenched to hold the chaos until it was just right. Digging fingers, needy strokes, hungry mouths, writhing limbs. Any small thing could destroy them or finally exalt them. Everything ached from the tensing, but nothing let down, or let up. Their minds were so close to being the same that his legs twitched at her feelings and her hips bucked up into his. 

_Now! Together._

The sensation tangled up first in the hips. He moved away to clench his teeth. She arched her back as his steady arms kept her pinned. He growled into her lower abdomen as his head gave way spilling himself into the pool. She let out a breathy moaning scream. They felt the sensation rocket up into them all panic switch and flashing lights, but perfect danger. It felt like hearts stopped together. Then their minds drowned in the shared echo of each other and the sound split open into a chorus. It buzzed over every space and split them wide blowing away every other thought. Every beautiful connected feeling settling in like the tide over the hollowed out places left by the receding cacophony.

_They collapsed._

Crumbling together. He sat in the pool and he moved her into his lap. She straddled him, and laid limply over his chest as he held her into him with an arm that felt right. They couldn't remember a time when they had felt needed. 

Now they were in a world where they belonged, even if just for now. Even if just for each other.

  
__________  
**Endnotes:** Chapter title song: a line from, “Petersburg, Liberty Theatre, 1914”, by Swan Lake. A special thank you to user PoorQueequeg for assistance in editing and refining this chapter~ you rock!

**Author's Note:**

> Hey you amazing creature, thanks for sticking it out and reading the start of my first multi-chapter fanfic. I love me some Reylo, and I have super appreciated all the support I've gotten from fans of the pairing in my foray into fanart. Hopefully I can contribute something interesting through my writing as well! I seriously can't express how much any feedback means to me, and as an inexperienced writer I am open to feedback and critique. 
> 
>  
> 
>  **Next on Us Ones In Between: Chapter 13-** So, good things come in threes right... or maybe its good people? I suppose that might suggest what you should expect a bit more of soon. Plus, there are emotional connections to work out as well as physical.


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